A Resource-based View of the EU’s Regional and International Leadership Adrienne H eritier European University Institute Aseem Prakash University of Washington Abstract How does one explain the variation in the EU’s success in enacting and enforcing policies that lead to the supply of regional or global public goods? We examine how the EU deploys its positional resources to enact laws that compel governments or firms to contribute to the provision of public goods. We suggest that leaders such as the EU are able to compel public goods contributions if they have the legal authority to do so, and are able to deploy their positional resources to build effective coalitions or reduce the leverage of potential veto players. We look at two issue areas empirically: banking and the environment. In the banking cases, the EU sought to provide regional public goods; in the environmental cases, it sought to provide regional and global public goods. We examine instances of leadership success as well as failure. In the banking cases, we examine Outright Monetary Transactions (success) and banking single resolution mechanism (less successful); the environmental cases pertain to chemical regulation (success) and air- line emissions (failure). These cases reveal the EU’s skill and limitations in deploying its positional authority to induce contributions for public goods provision from EU member governments, EU firms and nonEU firms. This special issue explores how political leadership exer- cised by organizational actors mitigates collective action problems, thereby correcting governance failures. Con- sistent with the definition outlined in the introductory essay by Prakash et al., we conceptualize leadership as the orchestration of collective action towards a particu- lar end and explore variations in its success. We exam- ine the organizational leadership of EU actors: that is, the EU and organizational actors (such as the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission) within it. Specifically, we seek to explain variations in their success to enact and enforce regulatory policies that compel governments or firms to contribute to the provision of regional or global public goods (Karagiannis and H eritier, 2013). The policies we explore are redistrib- utive in nature (also see Koremenos’ article in this spe- cial issue). Actors that are net losers in the bargain tend to resist the EU’s regulatory initiatives. This is where the EU’s political leadership comes in. It has to overcome this resistance while taking into account the diversity of preferences among its member governments and multi- veto points it faces in its decision-making processes (Tsebelis, 1995). How does it seek to accomplish these complex tasks? Why does it succeed and why does it fail? Leadership is a highly researched issue in organiza- tional theory (for excellent surveys see Chemers and Ayman, 1993; Luthans, 1995; Northouse, 1997). Leader- ship theories highlight the role of key actors in policy change (Barnard, 1938). Policy success depends on the attributes of leaders, followers, as well as the issue under consideration. We focus on a single leader attribute, posi- tional resource – i.e. formal competences as defined by the institutional rules that apply in the decision-making situation – and examine it in two issue areas. We suggest that a leader’s appropriate understanding of its positional resource (especially whether it has the legal mandate to enact regulations) along with the skill in deploying it (i.e. choosing an appropriate strategy to overcome possible opposition to redistributive decisions) is necessary for successful leadership. We expect leaders to fail when they incorrectly assess or interpret their legal mandate or fail to choose an appropriate strategy in view of institu- tional restrictions. This is quite common because man- dates are incomplete contracts and organizations need to negotiate in grey areas (H eritier, 2007). Hence, both the skill in interpreting its mandate and building a win- ning coalition are necessary to push through regulatory changes that the ‘losers’ view as redistributive or as man- ifesting organizational overreach. This is not to say that Global Policy (2015) 6:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12241 © 2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy Volume 6 . Issue 3 . September 2015 247 Special Section Article