In the Name of Recipients and Because of the Changing Development Architecture: EU Member States, Resistance to Europeanisation and the Issue of Aid Effectiveness

Since the early the 2000s, the European Commission has expressed an overt ambition to ‘federate’ the aid policies of the EU Member States. One of the various initiatives concerns complementarity and division of labour between European donors, with the view to enhancing not only the quality but also the impact of EU foreign aid. This paper, which relies on empirical research conducted in six countries in sub-Saharan Africa, argues that EU Member States have resisted this attempt of ‘soft Europeanization’ by invoking two external factors: firstly, the ever-complex development architecture (with emerging powers not interested in this issue and other international actors promoting wider coordination mechanisms), which seems to make the Europeanization of aid (effectiveness) redundant and even dangerous; secondly, the resistance of developing countries, which lament a trade-off between (Europeanization of) aid effectiveness and recipient ownership, seeing the risks of a potentially larger but more inflexible donor.