A relational approach to EU Development Policy

One way to decenter the analysis of EU Development Policy is to focus on the relation between the EU and its recipients, the governments and organizations of particular countries as well as continental partners such as the African Union. These relationships may be a key to understanding the rather limited impact and slow transformation of politics and economics in African and other countries. One example of a muddled relationships is in the EU Africa strategy, where the EU tries to dominate while it also wants to be a partner of the AU (Niklasson, forthcoming). A traditional approach to understanding relations between two parties is by means of game theory, which is seldom used in the analysis of Development Policy. Interesting exceptions are by Whitfield et al (2009) and some scholars inspired by Institutional Economics. My ambition is to discuss strengths and weaknesses of game theory in relation to norm-based perspectives on the donor-recipient relationship. Game theory starts from assumptions about interests and lack of trust as well as information. Advanced versions include cultural and other factors (Pomerantz 2004). Norm-based alternatives come in many forms, where one is to complement a logic of consequences with a logic of appropriateness (Schimmelfennig 2018), producing a variety of constructivist perspectives (Kratochvil & Tulmets 2018). This has been more common in studies of the European Neighborhood Policy. Other versions focus on the development of shared norms or identities, which seems to take place in the area of Peace and Security (Haastrup 2013). A special case is the use of role theory to understand mutual expectations (Thies & Wehner 2019). This has been used to analyse the recipients’ perceptions of the EU (Bengtsson & Elgström 2012). Important background factors (EU and Africa) are government capacity, uniformity /actorness and legitimacy.