The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has tested the capacity of local, regional, national and supranational institutions to provide quick, effective and flexible responses to social and economic challenges never before known. In this sense, many of the extraordinary measures adopted to manage the crisis have (and will have) important political and institutional effects in the short and long term. The main objective is to observe whether these changes are limited to routine decisions or whether, on the contrary, they radically alter the instruments and hierarchy of objectives that underpin cohesion policy, giving rise to changes in the EU's multi-level governance system.