UNIDAD CONDENSADORA

One puzzling, perhaps confusing, aspect that the reader may have found reading the formulation of the research problem is the multiple uses of the term governance.

Democratic governance, good governance, external governance, network governance, and simply governance (to cite a few) are all the terms that are so frequently used and abused in the literature. The word “governance” comes from the Greek word

“kybenan” and “kybernetes”, meaning “to steer” (cybernetics also come from it).¹³¹ According to Rosenau, governance refers to governments’ activities in framing goals, issuing directives, and pursuing policies.¹³² Kooiman expands this definition to “all those activities of social, political and administrative actors that can be seen as purposeful efforts to guide, steer, control or manage societies”.¹³³ Just like TG cooperation, the concept of governance has come on a scholarly and policymaking arena to break up or revisit the idea of a government and nation-state by including into the equation a variety of non-state actors, domestic and international. It was also

130 Marilyn Stember, “Advancing the Social Sciences through the Interdisciplinary Enterprise,” The Social Science Journal 28, no. 1 (1991): 1–14.

131 James Rosenau, “Governance in the Twenty-First Century,” Global Governance 1 (1995): 14.

132 Ibid.

133 Jan Kooiman, Modern Governance: New Government-Society Interactions (SAGE Publications, 1993), 2.

called to revisit the existing boundaries of government-society interactions through developing new models of partnership like management, steering, and co-guidance.¹³⁴ In their development assistance programmes, however, the Bretton Woods institutions and, later, the European Commission have generally continued placing the government in the core of governance.

In order to foster market reform and fight corruption and inefficiency in the governments of less developed countries, the World Bank first introduced the concept of good governance to its structural adjustment policies in the late 1980s.¹³⁵ In 2000, the EU included its first binding clause relating to good governance into the Cotonou Agreement with the group of African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries. This document defined “good governance” as “the transparent and accountable management of human, natural, economic and financial resources for the purposes of equitable and sustainable development”. ¹³⁶ Consequent to that, poor or bad governance stood for a lack of good governance.

Following the “big bang” enlargement and the necessity to re-think its relations with the new neighbours under the ENP, the EU adopted an explicitly political meaning of governance by introducing the concept of “democratic governance” in its official communications.¹³⁷ This represented a further shift from the World Bank’s technocratic approach to policy reforms towards those associated with democratic legitimacy and public accountability. Although the EU did not make an effort to clarify the resulting confusion between good and democratic governance in terms of conceptual boundaries, the democratic governance in the EU’s usage does seem, beyond the traditional focus on more effective public management, to imply a stronger emphasis on the transparency and accountability of the country’s authorities before the general public.¹³⁸

At about the same time, some scholars described EU relations with the new neighbours under the ENP as an extension of the EU’s internal governance beyond its borders and coined such an extension EU external governance.¹³⁹ Those authors designated three institutional forms or modes in which the EU extended its governance abroad: hierarchy, markets, and networks.¹⁴⁰Hierarchical governance refers to the patterns of domination-subordination between the EU and the ENP countries, as seen

134 Ibid., 3.

135 Wil Hout, “Governance and Development: Changing EU Policies,” Third World Quarterly 31, no. 1 (February 2010): 2; World Bank, “From Crisis to Sustainable Growth - Sub Saharan Africa: A Long-Term Perspective Study,”

1989.

136 Nikki Slocum-Bradley and Andrew Bradley, “Is the EU’s Governance ‘Good’? An Assessment of EU Governance in Its Partnership with ACP States,” Third World Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2010): 34.

137 Maurizio Carbone, “The European Union, Good Governance and Aid Co-Ordination,” Third World Quarterly 31, no. 1 (February 2010): 21; Jan Orbie et al., “The Normative Distinctiveness of the European Union in International Development Stepping out of the Shadow of the World Bank?,” 2014, 11.

138 Hout, “Governance and Development: Changing EU Policies.”

139 Lavenex, “EU External Governance in ‘Wider Europe.’”

140Lavenex and Schimmelfennig, “EU Rules beyond EU Borders: Theorizing External Governance in European Politics,” 800.

in the existence of precise rules, procedures, monitoring, and even sanctioning for non-compliance.¹⁴¹ Hierarchical governance was more common under the rigid framework of accession; however, even under the ENP, some forms of hierarchical governance have prevailed, e.g., sectoral or policy conditionality.¹⁴² The market governance relies on the market forces of competition among autonomous actors, which operate under the regulatory framework of the European Single Market.¹⁴³ Market governance is common among the countries of the European Economic Area and has little relevance for the ENP countries yet. Finally, the network governance is based on a relationship between two formally equal actors and refer to “a strongly institutionalised and unified system of ongoing horizontal co-ordination” between the EU and its neighbours.¹⁴⁴ The network-type of EU external governance best describes EU TG cooperation programmes under the ENP.¹⁴⁵ In sum, TG cooperation in the ENP is considered a tool of network governance, through which the EU may promote democratic governance and regulatory standards to the neighbours concerned.

As for democratic governance, the ambiguity over its precise meaning still prevails among scholars, who have offered multiple definitions of the concept in order to match their analytical tools and theoretical approaches.¹⁴⁶ According to Brinkerhoff, for example, “democratic governance combines features of a political regime in which citizens hold the right to govern themselves (democracy) with structures and mechanisms that are used to manage public affairs according to accepted rules and procedures (governance).”¹⁴⁷ This definition resonates with the broad understanding of democratic governance by the EU and some authors.¹⁴⁸ However, by including a bit of everything, such formulation breeds more conceptual vagueness than it eliminates.

Börzel et al. adopt a clearer and narrower view on democratic governance by presenting it as an integral part of EU good governance promotion. It pursues input-oriented objectives, such as inclusion of citizen preferences into public

141 Ibid., 797.

142 Delcour, “Meandering Europeanisation. EU Policy Instruments and Policy Convergence in Georgia under the Eastern Partnership.”

143 Lavenex and Schimmelfennig, “EU Rules beyond EU Borders: Theorizing External Governance in European Politics,” 799.

144 Ibid., 798.

145 Lavenex, “A Governance Perspective on the European Neighbourhood Policy: Integration beyond Conditionality?,” 942. Another resonating concept – democratic network governance – has more to do with intrastate relations, e.g., public-private partnerships or EU internal governance, than with EU relations with the ENP countries.

146 Derick W Brinkerhoff, “Democratic Governance and Sectoral Policy Reform: Tracing Linkages and Exploring Synergies,” World Development 28, no. 4 (April 2000): 601–15; Tanja Börzel, Yasemin Pamuk, and Andreas Stahn,

“The European Union and the Promotion of Good Governance in Its Near Abroad. One Size Fits All?,” SFB-Governance Working Paper Series, 2008; Freyburg, Skripka, and Wetzel, “Democracy between the Lines? EU Promotion of Democratic Governance via Sector-Specific Co-Operation”; Jessica Schmidt, “Constructing New Environments versus Attitude Adjustment: Contrasting the Substance of Democracy in UN and EU Democracy Promotion Discourses,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, August 8, 2014, 1–20.

147 Brinkerhoff, “Democratic Governance and Sectoral Policy Reform: Tracing Linkages and Exploring Synergies,”

602.

148 Szent-Iványi, “The EU’s Support for Democratic Governance in the Eastern Neighbourhood: The Role of Transition Experience from the New Member States.”

making, and operates at the transnational level of relations between the EU and the partner country. ¹⁴⁹ While deserving some praise for its succinctness, this conceptualisation of democratic governance has found little resonance among scholarly circles.

My understanding of democratic governance has been inspired by EU external governance scholars, who view it as a tri-dimensional construct of transparency, accountability, and participation.¹⁵⁰ In other words, the governance of a public institution is considered democratic if it operates on the principles of transparency, accountability, and participation in its everyday decision-making, dealings with the general public, and the state. As mentioned earlier, the available literature provides a relatively good discussion of EU democratic governance promotion, its most common issues, typologies, and impacts.¹⁵¹ However, what seems to be missing is the comprehensive analysis of the “what” or substance of EU democratic governance promotion in the neighbourhood. Democracy promotion scholars have already categorised and explored the substance of EU democracy promotion in the ENP countries.¹⁵² Börzel et al have also looked at the substance of EU good governance promotion and how it varied in response to domestic conditions in Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia.¹⁵³ In line with those works, I decided to introduce a new concept pertaining to the substance of EU democratic governance promotion, or democratic governance substance.

Democratic governance substance refers to the presence of democratic governance norms in a specific instance of EU foreign policy. According to its configuration (domination of specific norms), democratic governance substance may be transparency-oriented, accountability-oriented, participation-oriented, and mixed.

According to its magnitude (overall degree of presence), democratic governance substance may be low, medium, and high.¹⁵⁴ In explaining the variation of democratic governance substance across various EU TG projects, I mostly rely on variables commonly found in the EU external governance and Europeanisation literature, like sector politicisation and country’s political liberalisation. However, the third variable, sector technical complexity, hypothesised to be inversely related to the democratic governance substance of EU TG cooperation, has been inspired by a debate over the

149 Börzel, Pamuk, and Stahn, “The European Union and the Promotion of Good Governance in Its Near Abroad.

One Size Fits All?”

150 Lavenex and Schimmelfennig, “EU Democracy Promotion in the Neighbourhood: From Leverage to Governance?”

151 Ibid.; Freyburg et al., Democracy Promotion by Functional Cooperation: The European Union and Its Neighbourhood; Slocum-Bradley and Bradley, “Is the EU’s Governance ‘Good’? An Assessment of EU Governance in Its Partnership with ACP States.”

152 Anne Wetzel, Jan Orbie, and Fabienne Bossuyt, “One of What Kind? Comparative Perspectives on the Substance of EU Democracy Promotion,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 28, no. 1 (2015): 21–34; Anne Wetzel and Jan Orbie, “Promoting Embedded Democracy? Researching the Substance of EU Democracy Promotion.,” European Foreign Affairs Review 16, no. 5 (2011): 565–88.

153 Börzel, Pamuk, and Stahn, “The European Union and the Promotion of Good Governance in Its Near Abroad.

One Size Fits All?”

154 Those ideal types are discussed in detail in Article 3, where they were applied in analysing EU Twinning projects in the Eastern neighbourhood.

politics-administration dichotomy. The next subsection briefly introduces the reader to this debate.