The Europeanisation of budget support: do government capacity and autonomy matter?

ABSTRACT

In the last decade, budget support (BS) has become one of the most popular and controversial aid modalities. The tensions between the EU and member states regarding the use of this modality set in motion interesting policy influencing dynamics. We reconstruct these processes looking at two turning-points (the inception and the subsequent reform of the BS policy) and compare over time the positions, capacities and policies of three EU member states with varying positions towards BS: Germany, the UK and Belgium. We find no evidence that the EU has been able to download its BS policies. Instead we find some evidence of limited delegation to the EU level, and strong indications of member states uploading policy preferences to the EU level. We further argue that domestic politics in member states matters more than EU aid policy prescriptions, and that the EU's policy space is crucially influenced by its own and member states capacities and autonomy to build political alliances around policy preferences.

KEYWORDS:

• Budget support
• Europeanisation
• Germany
• UK
• Belgium

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Budget support can be divided into general and sector budget support, with the latter constituting funds that are earmarked to a specific sector. For the purposes of this paper, budget support generally refers to general budget support and uses ‘budget support’ and ‘general budget support’ interchangeably.

2. Countries where field research took place include: Vietnam, Senegal, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Zambia and DRC.

3. www.oecd.org/dac/unitedkingdom.htm and http://www.oecd.org/dac/germany.htm.

4. www.oecd.org/dac/belgium.htm.