Description
Much of the debate about the impact of Brexit has focused primarily on economic and macro-political issues, while little attention has been paid to the meso-level of governance where most UK-EU cooperation currently takes place. In particular researchers have largely neglected contingencies and crisis management, despite these being critical areas of transnational security governance. This article aims to address this oversight by assessing whether and how UK crisis governance will adapt as a result of Brexit. In line with wider debates about the nature and impact of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, it assesses whether crisis governance will undergo a period of “epochal change” or maintain “significant continuities with the past” as well as the contingency and timing of any such changes (Wincott, 2017). It addresses this question through a detailed examination of two areas of UK crisis governance – pandemics and gas supply deficits that exhibit differing degrees of europeanisation. We argue that change and continuity will play out in contingent ways over different time-scales. In the short-term, Brexit will not result in a complete decoupling of UK and EU crisis governance. Based on interviews with active participants in the networks for governing pandemics and gas-supply deficits, we find evidence of a continued willingness to pursue adaptive strategies to maintain coordination and cooperation between the UK and EU within the constraints of the terms of the UK’s withdrawal and the negotiation of the future UK-EU relationship. However in the longer term there is an expectation and concern that cooperation will become increasingly difficult to sustain due to regulatory divergence.
