The substance of EU Democratic Governance promotion via transgovernmental cooperation: The Twinning programme in the Southern Neighbourhood (2004-2019)

• Autor(a) principal: Alves, Vicente
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/26498
• topic: Democracia -- Democracy; Governance; MENA; European Neighbourhood Policy; European Union; Governança; MONA; Política Europeia de Vizinhança; União Europeia

While scholars of Europeanisation are often sceptical of the Europeanising and democratising potential of the European Neighbourhood Policy, students of “Democratic Governance” stress the need to highlight the European Union’s differentiated impact in partner countries’ domestic structures. Concretely, this research branch calls out for a policy differentiated analysis of the transposition of EU norms through transgovernmental functional cooperation. For “Democratic Governance” scholars, the EU’s impact in its Neighbours’ varies across policy sectors and contexts, being dependent on a set of key scope conditions, such as political, economic and security interests, regime type and statehood, as well as the strategic leverage between actors and, finally, the technical complexity of policy fields. This research project aims to contribute to this literature through a qualitative-quantitative analysis of 222 Twinning projects implemented in the EU’s Southern Neighbourhood between 2004 and 2019. This thesis finds that the EU’s Democratic Governance promotion efforts in the Southern Neighbourhood are timid, albeit varying across policy fields and countries. This variation is best explained by the capacities of the public administrations in partner countries, as well as the existence of political adoption costs, a strategic leverage favourable to the EU and the degree of technical complexity of policy fields.