The EU’s Role in Development Cooperation: Promoting Aid Harmonisation in Times of Crisis

Despite starting from a highly fragmentary development policy system, a considerable consensus on policy norms for effective development cooperation has become prevalent on the EU level. This consensus makes claims about the EU’s role in European development cooperation. This role embraces the EU’s active promotion of approximation and convergence of European policies on aid and development cooperation, the EU’s so called “federating role”. The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretically-informed model for understanding institutional dynamics in European development cooperation in terms of competing ideas and discourses on the EU’s role in regard to national aid policies. After clarifying the theoretical background and main concepts, the paper has provided, first, a long term narrative of institutional dynamics in EU development cooperation and, second, a close-up illustration for the period between 2009 and 2012. Following from this, the paper proposes an agency-oriented, discursive institutionalist perspective which stresses the role of policy entrepreneurs and epistemic communities in challenging and perpetuating obstacles to institutional change in EU development cooperation