Political Conditionality as a Strategy of Subsidy Administration

多年来，欧盟（尤其是其成员国德国）对商业企业的补贴创新高，且在COVID-19疫情后再次大幅增加。这些补贴旨在维持和提高各自经济体的经济实力，但也可以作为追求其他公共目标的工具，特别是生态目标（例如，更经济地使用资源）和社会（例如，“工作出色”、最高管理层的两性平等）目标。对于政治家和管理者来说，这为控制和指导开辟了新的潜力，而这些潜力才刚刚开始被开发。到目前为止，某些（额外的）公共目标与补贴的实际目的的结合是相当偶然和偶然的。然而，这样做的要求越来越多，考虑到相应补贴的财政层面，很可能会出现一个公共战略。笔者建议将这一公共策略置于“政治制约”的标题下进行分析，法律的学术界必须将这一策略概念化，并对其进行系统评价，探讨其与欧洲法、德国宪法以及行政法一般原则的兼容性。该研究项目还涉及现有和潜在的执行、监督和制裁机制。通过评估政治条件性战略的长处和短处，必须使这一战略的潜力透明化，但也必须找出其短处。因此，研究项目的第一步将包括汇编关于公共行政领域政治条件经验的现有数据。该项目的最终目标将是提出起草和制定建议，供欧洲和德国各级的行政人员和立法人员在实践中加以利用。欧洲区域和结构基金是一个特别重要的应用领域。就专题覆盖范围而言，该研究项目首先涉及补贴发挥重要作用的所有政策领域，即气候保护、大流行性人类疾病、数字化和建立平等的生活条件。

Over many years, the European Union and in particular its member state Germany have recorded high, and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic once again signifi-cantly increased, subsidies to commercial enterprises. These subsidies are intended to maintain and improve the economic strength of the respective economies, but can also serve as a tool for pursuing additional public objectives, in particular ecological (e.g., more economical use of resources) and social (e.g., "good work", gender equality at the top management levels) goals. For politicians and administrators, this opens up new potentials for control and steering that is only just beginning to be ex-ploited. Up to now, the coupling of certain (additional) public objectives with the actu-al purpose of the subsidy has taken place rather coincidental and occasional. How-ever, demands to do so are increasing, and given the financial dimension of the re-spective subsidies, it is likely that a public strategy will emerge from this. I suggest to analysis this public strategy under the heading of "political conditionality".Legal scholarship must conceptualize and systematically evaluate this strategy and explore its compatibility with European law, German constitutional law, and the gen-eral principles of administrative law. The research project also addresses existing and potential implementation, supervision, and sanctioning mechanisms. By as-sessing the strengths and weaknesses of the strategy of political conditionality, the potentials of this strategy must be made transparent, but also its shortcomings have to be identified. Therefore, the first step of the research projects will consist of com-piling the existing data regarding the experiences with political conditionality in the area of public administration. The final objective of the project will be to generate drafting and framing proposals, which subsidizing administrators and legislators on the European and on the German level can make use of in practice. European re-gional and structural funds are a particularly important field of application. In terms of thematic coverage, the research project addresses above all those policy areas, in which subsidies play an important role, namely climate protection, pandemic man-agement, digitalization, and the establishment of equal living conditions.