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Abstract
While the Europeanisation literature has examined several aspects of EU transgovernmental cooperation under the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), very little is yet known as to the extent and the conditions under which such cooperation effectively transfers EU norms to ENP countries. Using a qualitative comparative analysis of 32 Twinning projects in Ukraine, the article finds that legal and institutional convergence with EU norms has occurred mainly because of the policy fit of a Twinning project with the needs and technical capacities of the beneficiary administration, notwithstanding sector politicisation, EU sectoral conditionality or the quality of socialisation between civil servants.
I would like to extend my sincere words of gratitude to Prof. Dr Fabienne Bossuyt, Prof. Dr Jan Orbie, and other colleagues from the Centre for EU Studies at Ghent University for their valuable feedback on the early drafts of this article. The methodological advice on the use of QCA by Dr Anne Wetzel, Dr Bruno Vandecasteele, and Dr Tim Haesebrouck is also very much appreciated. I thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors from Europe-Asia Studies for their thoughtful and stimulating comments on this manuscript. A big thank you also goes to the 45 Twinning officials and experts for their time and first-hand information shared during the interviews. Finally, the author is grateful to the Erasmus Mundus Action 2 (EuroEast) programme and the Special Research Fund (BOF) of Ghent University for their generous financial support of this study.
Notes
1 Twinning fiches are baseline documents of a Twinning project detailing project rationales, activities, deadlines, and expected outputs.
2 The TAIEX (Technical Assistance and Information Exchange) instrument was introduced in 2006 by the European Commission to help the EU accession candidates and other neighbouring countries in the process of reform. Through workshops, expert missions, and study visits, TAIEX supplies the public administrations of EU partner countries with short-term expertise in the approximation, application, and enforcement of EU legislation, and facilitates the sharing of EU best practices.
3 SIGMA (Support for Improvement in Governance and Management) is a joint initiative of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the EU, which aims to support the socio-economic development of partner countries by promoting public administration reforms.
4 TACIS (Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States) is an EU technical assistance programme to help members of the Commonwealth of Independent States in their transition to democratic and market-oriented economies.
5 Interview 40. See Appendix 1 for a full list of interviews.
6 I am not hereby claiming that Twinning projects are exclusively responsible for a particular change in the legal or institutional landscape of Ukraine. Rather, legal and institutional convergence should be understood as a product of broader political and administrative processes in a specific policy area, of which Twinning is an important part.
7 It should be noted that the process of coding relies on the researcher’s choices about the inclusion or exclusion of cases in specific categories and may omit some complexity in messy real-world data. That has become one of the most widespread criticisms of csQCA (Schneider & Wagemann Citation2012). In response, researchers have developed ‘fuzzy-set QCA’ (fsQCA), which supports a more nuanced gradation of conditions by allowing the inclusion of three or more categories during operationalisation. However, as Schneider and Wagemann put it, if conditions and outcomes, owing to the character of empirical data, are better represented by dichotomous values, csQCA represents a more appropriate tool (Schneider & Wagemann Citation2012, p. 277). Therefore, the present study uses the crisp-set variant of QCA because the conditions and outcomes of Twinning effectiveness can be represented more intuitively as binary values.
8 Kirq is a standalone, cross-platform GUI programme, based on Python and QT programming languages, developed by Christopher Reichert and Claude Rubinson.
9 Interviews 40, 42.
10 Interviews 23, 24, 28.
11 Interviews 12, 27, 33, 34.
12 Interview 12.
13 Interviews 33, 34, 40.
14 Interviews 24, 27, 37, 42.
15 Interview 37.
16 Interviews 7, 11, 15.
17 Interview 27.
18 Interviews 25, 26, 33.
19 See Appendix 2 for detailed truth tables and necessity analysis.
20 Interviews 3, 4, 6, 18, 21, 23, 24, 28, 29, 37.
21 Interview 37.
22 Interview 6.
23 Interviews 5, 17, 20, 28, 30.
24 Interviews 4, 28, 30, 40.
25 Interviews 12, 15, 25.
26 Interviews 14, 37.
27 Interview 21.
28 Interviews 3, 24, 40.
29 Interviews 21, 22, 25, 40.
30 Interviews 4, 25.
31 Interviews 1, 15, 30.
32 Interviews 2, 22, 40.
33 Interviews 7, 24, 37, 38.
34 Interviews 21, 37, 40.
35 Interviews 11, 31, 41, 42.
36 Interview 41.
37 Interviews 37, 40.
38 Interview 28.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dmytro Panchuk
Dmytro Panchuk, Associated Researcher, Centre for EU Studies, Ghent University, Universiteitstraat 8, Ghent 9000, Belgium