Pre-Accession Assistance as EU Policy-Making in Practice: Evolution, Implementation, and Governance

This paper examines the European Union’s (EU) pre-accession assistance as a distinctive yet understudied dimension of EU policy-making and implementation. Situated at the intersection of enlargement policy, budgetary governance, and external relations, pre-accession assistance illustrates how the EU deploys financial and technical instruments to extend its regulatory and normative influence beyond its borders. By tracing the evolution of these mechanisms – from the early ad hoc support to Portugal in the 1980s to the institutionalization of PHARE, ISPA, SAPARD, and the successive Instruments for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA I–III) –, the paper demonstrates how enlargement has served as a laboratory for EU policy innovation, experimentation, and learning. Through a comparative and longitudinal approach covering 14 Member States and six candidate countries, the paper analyses how EU conditionality, administrative capacity-building, and financial management practices have co-evolved with broader transformations in EU governance. It situates pre-accession assistance within the Union’s multi-level policy architecture, emphasizing the interplay between the European Commission’s agenda-setting and monitoring roles, recipient states’ ownership of implementation, and the technocratic logic of conditionality. Empirically, the paper identifies recurring implementation challenges – including political instability, limited administrative capacity, and uneven absorption of funds –, while theoretically contributing to debates on EU external governance, policy effectiveness, and the legitimacy of conditionality. Pre-accession assistance, thus, emerges as both an instrument of policy diffusion and a site of negotiation over the boundaries of the EU polity. Ultimately, the paper argues that pre-accession assistance exemplifies the EU’s hybrid mode of governance, blending development aid, regulatory alignment, and soft power. As enlargement regains strategic relevance in the wake of geopolitical shifts, understanding the evolution and limits of this policy tool is key to assessing the EU’s problem-solving capacity, legitimacy, and resilience as a global policy actor.