From principle to practice? The resilience–local ownership nexus in the EU Eastern Partnership policy

ABSTRACT

By emphasizing concepts such as resilience and local ownership, recent updates in the EU's foreign policy strategy have marked a narrative turn and signaled a shift in EU external governance toward its neighborhood. This article has two aims. First, we unpack the EU's conceptual understanding of resilience and local ownership as reflected in its recent strategic documents. Second, we examine the implications of the EU's narrative turn on actual policy practices in Eastern Partnership countries. We highlight a gap between the EU's broad understanding of resilience and local ownership and the narrow operationalization of these concepts in the EU's eastern policy. The article shows that the EU continued relying on the previously established policy frameworks, according to which resilience develops through approximation with EU templates. This strong path dependence precluded any effective policy turn toward local ownership.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• local ownership
• European Union
• EU foreign policy
• Eastern Partnership

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgments

We thank Elena Korosteleva, Trine Flockhart, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Irina Petrova is a researcher at the Leuven International and European Studies (LINES) Institute at KU Leuven and a research associate at the GCRF COMPASS project, University of Kent. Her research concentrates on comparative analysis of the EU and Russia's foreign policy strategies and their perceptions in the Eastern Partnership states. Previously Irina worked as a teaching assistant at the European Studies master program at KU Leuven and an adjunct lecturer at Vesalius College, Brussels. She was a research assistant for the H2020 UPTAKE project and Jean Monnet Network “C3EU: Crisis, Conflict and Critical Diplomacy: EU Perceptions in Ukraine, Israel and Palestine,” led by the University of Christchurch, New Zealand.

Laure Delcour is an Associate Professor in European Studies and International Relations, Université Paris 3-Sorbonne nouvelle. She is also a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. She has been involved in EU-funded projects on the ENP/Eastern Partnership, both as a researcher under the H2020 project EU-STRAT and as a scientific coordinator of the FP7 project “Exploring the Security-Democracy Nexus in the Caucasus” (CASCADE, FMSH, Paris). As part of a French–British research project (EUIMPACTEAST, ANR-ESRC, 2011–2014), she has investigated the EU's influence on domestic change in four post-Soviet countries (Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine). She has lectured on EU institutions and decision-making, the European Neighbourhood Policy, EU-Russia relations, and Russia's foreign policy (Sciences-Po Paris; Sciences-Po Strasbourg; Moscow State Institute of International Relations MGIMO, Moscow).

ORCID

Irina Petrova http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9021-8617

Laure Delcour http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4753-7027

Notes

1 The official documents use the terms “local ownership,” “joint ownership,” and “mutual ownership” interchangeably referring to the same concept. In this article, we use the term “local ownership” as it is more common in the academic literature.

2 For more discussion on this, please see Korosteleva (2020) and Chandler (2020) in this special issue.

3 This argument is developed in-depth in Korosteleva's article (2020) in this special issue.

4 After the European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker proposed the revision of the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2014, a range of consultations with the stakeholders from the EU and partner states were conducted to reflect on the previous policy cycle of the ENP, its institutions, resources, and lessons learned.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the GCRF UKRI COMPASS project (ES/P010849/1).