Working Better Together? – A comparative and preliminary assessment of emerging Team Europe Initiatives

Team Europe was launched in April 2020 with its original aim to support the EU’s partner countries in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic by pulling together financial resources of member states and all EU institutions. Today the concept is more broadly understood as referring to collective action of the EU towards its international partners, with an important implementing role for so-called Team Europe Initiatives (TEIs). TEIs seek to strengthen cooperation among and joint action between various stakeholders including the EU, its member states, financial institutions, implementing agencies, partner countries, civil society and the private sector. Team Europe is also repeatedly put in relation to another recent EU initiative – Global Gateway – as a means to foster geopolitically relevant coordination and Global Gateway flagship initiatives. As new political initiatives, little empirical insights have so far been generated as to how TEIs function on the ground and to what extent they contribute to achieving the EU’s goals of greater visibility and (geopolitical) impact. With references to both, EU studies and the established development studies debate on aid effectiveness, this paper presents a comparative analysis of five TEIs and explores the balance between technical efforts to strengthen collective effectiveness of the EU on the ground and foreign policy considerations of the EU’s visibility and influence.