Capacity building in EU boundary governance: from rules to resources?

The European Union (EU) has traditionally been described as a regulatory state – strong in legislative and judicial authority for making binding rules but weak on executive powers and resources. Recent developments, however, suggest a gradual shift toward a polity that combines rule-making with capacity building. We examine the EU’s resource equipment for boundary governance through a framework emphasizing functional pressures. Using a dataset covering internal and external boundaries since the 1980s, we employ fractional logit regression to test our hypotheses. While member states remain generally cautious about pooling resources for boundary governance, we show that resources are more likely to be centralised when boundaries exhibit higher EU legislative and executive authority, and in response to crises. Moreover, at the external boundaries of the EU, capacity building through resource centralization is higher when boundaries are more closed and regulate human mobility.