The February 2023 earthquakes, centered near Kahramanmaraş on the East Anatolian Fault, killed tens of thousands of people and damaged or destroyed hundreds of thousands of buildings across eleven provinces. For earthquake engineers, the scale of the destruction was grimly familiar: Türkiye has long carried one of the world’s highest seismic hazard exposures, and successive earthquakes over the past decades have repeatedly exposed weaknesses in construction quality, code enforcement, and retrofit policy. What made the 2023 disaster particularly troubling, the authors note, was that many of the collapsed buildings had been built after major regulatory reforms and had passed through the country’s formal building inspection regime. Buildings that were, in the language of the state, inspected and compliant, failed in exactly the ways that inspection was supposed to prevent.

Türkiye overhauled its building inspection system in 2018, replacing an older framework in which municipal authorities directly controlled construction oversight with a system of licensed private building inspection firms. The reform was, on its face, a classic governance modernization: it moved inspection out of the hands of bodies that critics said were under-resourced and vulnerable to local political pressure, and into the hands of accredited private professionals with defined legal responsibilities. The logic was that accountability would transfer along with the task. Inspectors would be liable for what they certified; developers and contractors would face independent scrutiny; and the state would retain a supervisory role. The new paper argues that this transfer never truly happened, and that understanding why requires looking at how accountability actually behaves inside complex regulatory systems.

The central conceptual move in the Comment is the distinction between transferring a task and transferring accountability. A reform can hand a function, such as structural inspection, to a new actor while leaving the underlying incentives, information flows, and sanction mechanisms unchanged. In that case, the authors argue, accountability is not transferred but displaced: it drifts into institutional gaps where no actor is meaningfully answerable for failure. The private inspector may lack the independence, resources, or legal exposure to enforce the code against powerful developers. The municipality may believe it has washed its hands of oversight. The central government may assume the new system is self-policing. Each actor can point to another as the responsible party, and the chain of answerability that should connect a stamped drawing to a safe building quietly dissolves.

The field evidence from the 2023 earthquake zone gave the authors an unusually direct test of this hypothesis. Post-reform buildings that had been through the inspection process collapsed in the same manner, and at comparable rates in some localities, as older buildings constructed under the previous regime. If the reform had genuinely transferred accountability, one would expect the inspected stock to perform measurably better under identical shaking. The reconnaissance findings, gathered as part of an Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team mission supported by UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council funding, indicated that the formal inspection stamp had not functioned as a reliable proxy for structural quality. The paper treats this not as evidence that inspection is useless, but as evidence that inspection without genuine accountability transfer is a procedural ritual rather than a safety mechanism.

The authors ground their argument in comparative institutional analysis, and their acknowledgements point to Chile as an instructive counterpoint. Chile’s regulatory framework, refined after its own long history of great subduction-zone earthquakes, is widely regarded as achieving a closer coupling between design authority, construction oversight, and liability. The paper credits Juan Carlos De La Llera Martín of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile with clarifying details of that framework, suggesting that the authors use it to identify the institutional conditions under which accountability transfer can actually work. The contrast matters because it rules out a lazy conclusion that private inspection is inherently flawed. The lesson is instead conditional: the same institutional design can succeed or fail depending on whether liability, professional incentives, and enforcement capacity move together with the task.

Underlying the analysis is a set of technical realities about what building inspection can and cannot achieve. Structural safety in a major earthquake depends on decisions made long before an inspector arrives on site: geotechnical assessment, architectural configuration, the quality of reinforcement detailing, concrete strength, and the integrity of the construction sequence. An inspector who visits intermittently cannot retroactively verify hidden reinforcement or correct a poorly proportioned frame. Effective oversight therefore depends on continuous professional responsibility across the whole delivery chain, with each actor, designer, contractor, inspector, and certifier, bearing a defined and enforceable share of the risk. Where the law assigns nominal responsibility but the market makes rigorous enforcement economically suicidal for the individual professional, or where inspectors are paid by the developers they are meant to police, the nominal chain of accountability becomes a chain of plausible deniability.

The paper’s framing of the 2023 disaster as an invitation to urban disaster is deliberately forward-looking. Türkiye faces an enormous retrofit challenge: millions of existing buildings predate modern seismic codes, and the reconstruction of the earthquake zone is itself a vast new wave of construction passing through the same governance system. If the displacement of accountability identified in the Comment is not corrected, the same failure mode could recur in the rebuilt cities, and in the megacity of Istanbul, where seismologists anticipate a major earthquake on the North Anatolian Fault within the coming decades. The authors’ argument implies that the most urgent investment is not only in engineering capacity but in institutional design: independent funding for inspectors, genuine professional liability, transparent records, and state supervision with real teeth.

What gives the Comment its wider resonance is that the failure mode it describes is not unique to Türkiye or to earthquake engineering. Governance reforms worldwide, in building safety, food safety, financial oversight, and environmental regulation, routinely devolve tasks to private or quasi-independent actors on the assumption that accountability follows automatically. The 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London, for example, exposed a comparable tangle of fragmented responsibility in building regulation, where no single actor felt answerable for the safety of the cladding system. The Nature Communications paper offers a conceptual vocabulary, accountability transfer versus displacement, that can be applied across these domains, and a sober empirical anchor in the Turkish earthquake evidence.

The authors are careful about what their evidence can and cannot support. Their Comment draws on reconnaissance observations and institutional analysis rather than a comprehensive statistical audit of the collapsed building stock, and they acknowledge the contribution of an anonymous building inspection professional who provided context on current inspection practice in Türkiye. But the core claim is difficult to dismiss: a regulatory reform that looks like accountability transfer but leaves answerability where it was before is worse than no reform at all, because it manufactures public confidence in a system that has not changed. As reconstruction accelerates across the earthquake zone and Istanbul’s clock keeps ticking, the paper’s message is that the safety of cities depends not on the existence of inspection regimes but on whether the people who run them can truly be held to account when the ground shakes.

Subject of Research: Building governance reform and accountability transfer in seismic building inspection, examined through the 2023 Türkiye earthquake disaster

Article Title: Building governance reform without accountability transfer invites urban disaster

Article References: Aktas, Y. D., & Johnson, C. (2026). Building governance reform without accountability transfer invites urban disaster. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-78062-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-78062-2

Keywords: building governance, accountability transfer, Türkiye earthquake 2023, building inspection, seismic safety, urban resilience, governance reform, earthquake engineering, regulatory failure, Chile building regulation, disaster risk reduction, Nature Communications

The starting point of the analysis is the scale of the external shock. The United States, historically Europe’s closest ally, is now using its enormous market power as a geoeconomic weapon, imposing tariffs and regulatory pressure on partners and adversaries alike. According to the paper, the Trump administration’s approach is not an aberration but the product of a coherent ideological project, documented in initiatives such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which seeks to reshape American governance and its relationship with the world. For the EU, this means confronting a dual challenge: an economic assault on its export-driven model and a political assault on the liberal-democratic norms on which the Union itself is founded.

Technically, the EU’s response rests on an expanding arsenal of geoeconomic instruments. The paper highlights the Anti-Coercion Instrument, adopted in December 2023 under Regulation (EU) 2023/2675, which allows the Union to retaliate against third countries that apply economic pressure on member states. Alongside it stand the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, which regulate the power of large technology platforms, and the International Procurement Instrument, which opens third-country public procurement markets reciprocally. The European Economic Security Strategy of 2023 adds a further layer, focusing on the resilience of supply chains, the prevention of technology leakage, and the integration of economic security monitoring into the European External Action Service. Together, these instruments mark what the author describes as a geo-economization of EU policy: the deliberate fusion of economic regulation with strategic objectives.

Yet the empirical record shows how difficult de-risking remains in practice. Despite the EU’s defensive measures, its strategic dependency on China has actually increased, as measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, according to research by the Peterson Institute for International Economics cited in the study. The EU’s own China Strategy of 2019 famously described China as a partner, a competitor and a systemic rival simultaneously, a formulation that captures the Union’s ambivalence. While Washington and Beijing decouple, Brussels and Beijing have deepened trade ties, leaving the EU exposed precisely at the moment it seeks strategic autonomy. This tension between declared policy and measurable dependency is one of the central weaknesses the analysis identifies in the Union’s current approach.

To diversify away from this exposure, the EU has accelerated an ambitious trade agenda. Negotiations on the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with Indonesia were finalised on 23 September 2025, with entry into force expected by 1 January 2027. The Commission has also proposed the adoption of the long-stalled Mercosur and Mexico agreements, and is developing new instruments such as clean trade and investment partnerships and raw-materials partnerships designed to secure critical inputs for the green and digital transitions. The Global Gateway initiative, the EU’s answer to China’s Belt and Road, channels infrastructure investment into partner countries as a tool of geopolitical influence. The paper treats these moves as evidence that Brussels is rediscovering itself as a geopolitical union, at least in the economic domain.

Security policy shows a similar pattern of pragmatic acceleration. The European Defence Fund, a component of the Common Security and Defence Policy with a budget of nearly 7.3 billion euros for 2021 to 2027, coordinates national investment in defence research and improves interoperability between national armed forces. The European Peace Facility has mobilised 6.1 billion euros to reimburse countries exporting defence equipment to Ukraine, and the EU and its member states had collectively committed 63.2 billion euros in military support for Ukraine as of September 2025. Under the ReArm Europe plan and the NATO summit declaration of The Hague in June 2025, allies committed to reaching defence spending of 5 percent of GDP by 2035, of which 3.5 percent counts as core defence expenditure and 1.5 percent covers defence-related items such as infrastructure. The proposed 2028 to 2034 EU budget further embeds defence as a Union-level funding priority.

What the Union conspicuously has not done, according to the study, is reform its own governance. Treaty change, qualified majority voting in foreign and security policy, and deeper fiscal integration all remain blocked by the lack of political will and consensus among member states. Governments in Hungary and Slovakia, along with much of Europe’s right-wing populist landscape, favour a different course altogether, arguing that Europe should seek a balance with Russia through trade and concessions even as Russia rebuilds an empire on the continent’s eastern frontier. The paper contrasts this position with the view, articulated in Foreign Affairs, that a settlement of the Ukraine war favouring Russia would pose an existential threat to Europe. This fundamental disagreement over strategy is precisely what makes governance reform impossible and policy reform the only feasible path.

The author characterises the focus on policy reform as a pragmatic approach with genuine merits. It allows the Union to act quickly with the instruments it already possesses, avoiding the years of intergovernmental negotiation that treaty change would require. It also preserves the institutional status quo at a moment when the legitimacy of the entire European project is under ideological attack, including from within the United States, as illustrated by Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, which criticised European democratic norms. In this reading, the EU’s regulatory state, its single market and its trade competence are its strongest cards, and playing them aggressively is a rational adaptation to a hostile environment.

But the strategy carries a structural vulnerability that the paper places at the centre of its conclusion. Policy reform depends on supportive governments in the member states, and those governments are precisely what Trumpism seeks to change. Right-wing populist parties across Europe, emboldened and networked by their American counterparts, could win power in large EU countries and reverse the geoeconomic turn from within, blocking sanctions, diluting the Anti-Coercion Instrument, and steering the Union toward accommodation with Moscow. The analysis, drawing on recent scholarship on the alliance of the new right, warns that the entire edifice of pragmatic reform rests on a political foundation that could erode at the ballot box. Policy instruments, however sophisticated, cannot protect an institution whose member states no longer share its strategic premises.

The study thus answers its own title question with a qualified negative. Policy reform short of governance reform may suffice to manage the economic shock of Trumpism in the short term, and the evidence of the past two years, from defence spending commitments to new trade agreements, shows a Union capable of remarkable tactical adaptation. Yet without eventual governance reform, the EU lacks the resilience to withstand a political shock, namely the capture of major member-state governments by forces hostile to the integration project itself. The paper frames the present moment as a window of opportunity in which the Union can use the external threat as a catalyst for internal renewal, while acknowledging that whether that window remains open is a question that European voters, not Brussels technocrats, will ultimately decide.

Subject of Research: EU policy and governance reform in response to Trumpism and geoeconomic pressure from the United States

Article Title: Trump and the European Union: will policy reform short of governance reform suffice to withstand Trumpism?

Article References: Regenbrecht, J. (2025). Trump and the European Union: will policy reform short of governance reform suffice to withstand Trumpism?. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 422-432. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00126-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00126-8

Keywords: European Union, Trumpism, geoeconomics, governance reform, EU trade policy, economic security, defence policy, right-wing populism, strategic autonomy, Ukraine, China, NATO