Europeanisation of civil protection: the cases of Italy and Norway

Abstract

National civil protection systems have been developed and implemented each time a crisis unfolds with different degrees of success in responding and solving the crisis. However, crises are increasingly not confined by national borders and challenge the states’ capacities to adequately respond and thus calling for a crisis management governance that goes beyond the nation-state. In this respect, the European Union has developed its civil protection policy and through the Civil Protection Mechanism established forms of cooperation among the participating states of the Mechanism. In this paper, through the lenses of Europeanisation, we aim at uncovering the influences the Mechanism exercises on the Norwegian and Italian civil protection systems and, at the same time, we seek to spot out which kind of influences these states have on the Mechanism’s development. Europeanisation has been widely used as an analytical framework to mainly explain how national contexts are shaped by EU developments, but it is equally important to understand, as well, how national context shape European developments. Our data stem from document analysis and semi-structured interviews with civil protection officers at national and EU levels.