The accountability of pan-European public financial institutions: A scoping review and meta-synthesis

With the launch of Next Generation EU, scholarly interest in pan-European borrowing has increased, even though the European Union (EU) has been raising funds on capital markets for a variety of purposes for seven decades. In this working paper, we provide the results of a scoping review to identify relevant literature on the accountability of the various pan?European-level public financial institutions. A meta-synthesis then finds competing narratives in this corpus of studies, which frames accountability as providing democratic legitimacy, checks and balances, justice for affected communities, and learning opportunities. These findings highlight the contested meaning of accountability when it comes to pan-European public borrowing, but also a degree of unevenness in how borrowing instruments are analysed. Informative though existing studies are, few focus on more than one facet of accountability or compare the accountability of different borrowing instruments. Further comparative research is warranted to help hold European borrowing instruments to a more consistent set of accountability standards.