Institutionalising Networks, Practices and Discourses: 'Soft' Integration in European Development Cooperation

European integration has most visibly advanced along the institutional lines of the European Union (EU) and its predecessors. However, integration has often been “soft”, managing the incrementally grown interrelationships between various actors responsible for agenda-setting, policy construction and implementation at EU and member state level. This has been particularly important for policy areas where competences have been shared. This paper approaches these different forms of integration for the case of development cooperation, one of Europe’s oldest common policies. Whereas member states have been effective ‘gatekeepers’ to integration, other actors on the EU- and national level have interacted at various points, circumventing attempts at controlled policy construction. Between the Treaties of Maastricht and Lisbon no major institutional adaptions occurred in EU development cooperation. Nevertheless, the mid-2000s were assessed as a “new season” (Carbone 2008) in EU development cooperation as the focus turned to the system of all European development cooperation. Treaty changes have not been effective in tilting the discourse towards a specific function of the EU in all European development cooperation. Instead, other dynamics, such as administrative and policy reforms, changes in the international development discourse and actors’ entrepreneurship, have shifted the dominant discourse in the EU. This has led to “soft” institutionalisation, including stable networks and recurring practices, for the system of all-EU development cooperation. Although established discourses die hard, changing political priorities and external discourses since 2011 have challenged especially the Commission’s careful institutional engineering.