The monopoly of coercive public power has traditionally distinguished the State from other forms of political organization. Today we are witnessing a radical mutation of the such a paradigm: an increasingly stronger supranational space has come to encapsulate national institutions, challenging the State’s monopoly of coercion and fostering the creation of different tools of governance. The rise of conditionality is one of the most interesting, although still undertheorized, phenomena related to ongoing transformations of the public sphere.

Conditionality can be defined as the linking of certain benefits to the respect of given conditions or a given behavior. It has become a common tools of governance at different levels: international, European and federal. Despite such a widespread diffusion of conditionality, a comprehensive theory on the constitutional impact of conditionality is still underdeveloped. The aim of the project is to fill this gap and advance a new theoretical understanding of the use of conditionality as the main feature of a new and particular model of governance, affecting and transforming several fundamental principles of the classical public law paradigm. Why is conditionality ever so popular? What consequences is this phenomenon producing?

By investigating these questions the project aims at understanding how conditionality is transforming public power and whether it is creating a new model of governance and how it looks like. To this purpose, the EU will be considered as our main case-study for several reasons: 1) it is within the EU that we have witnessed to the rise of the use of conditionality, comparatively more than in other contexts; 2) Conditionality in the EU creates problems and several tensions with regard to principles of the EU itself; 3) the transformative potential of conditionality may have an impact on the future directions of the EU integration process.