The "España Puede" Plan and its territorial governance

Abstract

The “España Puede” Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan seeks to spend up to 70 billion in grants by 2026 from the new “Next Generation EU” fund. Its development until its presentation to the Commission at the end of April 2021  generated huge expectations about its potential as an anti-crisis instrument and to face the pending structural reforms, but also controversy about its possible territorial management. The Recovery and Resilience Mechanism tends to centralise management but makes investments not very different from those of traditional EU funds, making it a conceptual critique of EU Regional Policy. In this article, a first approach is made to the 110 Investments of the “Plan España Puede” and its consequences for Spanish territorial governance.

Keywords:

Next Generation EU, Territorial cohesion, Multilevel governance, recovery plan, COVID-19