The recovery and resilience facility as a transition stabiliser: recovery agendas across government transitions

The European Union’s (EU) Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) has profoundly transformed EU economic governance, yet we know less about how its performance-based architecture operates when Member State governments change during implementation. This article introduces a temporal perspective by conceptualising the RRF as a ‘transition stabiliser’ anchoring reform and investment trajectories over a six-year horizon, raising the political and financial costs of reversals, and allowing for limited recalibration to preserve ownership and feasibility. We examine whether the RRF can stabilise policy trajectories through a comparative analysis of government changeover in Italy (Draghi–Meloni), Slovakia (Heger–Fico), and the Netherlands (Rutte IV–Schoof). Drawing on elite interviews, official documents and secondary sources, the article shows that the RRF displays a bounded but effective stabilising capacity across cases. In Italy, transition stabilisation is driven by supranational enforcement, strategic usage of Europe and administrative internalisation within the core executive. In Slovakia, stabilisation constrains renegotiation but exposes limits in politically sensitive rule-of-law areas. In the Netherlands, stabilisation is more modest, often resulting in legalistic substitution and minimal compliance. Overall, the findings show how performance-based conditionality restructures political time, shifting contestation from whether reforms occur to how they are adapted during government transitions.