PhD thesis defence by Bernat Aritz Monge Nunes
This research studies why and how Member States reached an agreement over the European Youth Guarantee (EYG) and its funding vehicle – the Youth Employment Initiative (YEI). The study uses a process-tracing methodology centred on semi-structured interviews with the main actors who took part in the policy process at the EU level. This process provides many empirical insights into the contemporary Europeanisation of social and labour market policies. Furthermore, it establishes an empirical basis for a novel theory of post-liberal intergovernmentalism to explain solidaristic European integration. The research shows that Member States drive solidaristic EU integration when they converge around a normative imperative (tackling youth unemployment), and that skilful EU actors use well-established cognitive frameworks (social investment paradigm) to propose concrete and acceptable programmes.
The research then turns to the study of the effectiveness of the EYG and the YEI in recalibrating national labour market policies in line with the social investment paradigm. The methodology consists of process tracing through semi-structured interviews with the relevant stakeholders in two study cases: Italy and Spain. This study found that the YEI resources provided critical support for cash-strapped Member States during a time of fiscal austerity. However, a lack of resources to upgrade administrative capacity and labour intermediation networks limited the potential of these resources. Outreach measures were generally insufficient, and the quality of the ALMPs differed substantially between Northern and Southern regions. Despite their limitations, the EYG innovations proved key for Member States to recalibrate their policies. Thus, the EYG generated faster progress, became widely accepted, and opened the door for further solidaristic breakthroughs during the COVID-19 crisis.
Bernat Monge is a policy officer in the Planning and Evaluation Unit of the Public Employment Service of Catalonia, where he works on the evaluation of labour market policies and employment strategies. He is also a PhD candidate in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. Previously, he worked as a policy officer in the technical cabinet of the Department of Business and Labour of the Generalitat of Catalonia. He approaches his work with a strong vocation for public service, a deep desire for social progress, and a marked impatience with bureaucratic inertia and with doing things merely because that is how they have always been done.
His academic, professional, and intellectual interests blend with one another and encompass social investment policies, public administration reform, comparative political economy, European integration, and economic history.
More broadly, he is drawn to the figure of the Renaissance man as an ideal of intellectual and personal formation, an affinity only deepened by the time spent researching and writing in Florence. He sees social science not just as a technical exercise or a professional pursuit, but as a subtle art of understanding the moral, historical, and social forces that shape human lives.
Beyond his academic work, he is deeply interested in creative writing and storytelling, and is currently developing a literary project through which he explores questions of character formation during young adulthood, the erosion of seemingly unshakable institutions and political projects and the value of culture and collective memory.