Development Assistance of the EU towards Africa and European Institutional Behavior (and Their Focus on Poverty Eradication)

The European Union EU is one of the leaders in the field of development assistance. The region of Sub-Saharan Africa is a main recipient of this assistance which has the primary goal of eradicating poverty. This study will determine the effect of changes in institutional behaviour of the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union in the period from 2000 to 2018 on the international development assistance policy of the EU towards Sub-Saharan Africa with the purpose of eradicating poverty. The theoretical framework includes Historical Institutionalism with the concepts of critical junctures, path dependency and sequencing and the method used is process tracing. The main findings are that there are four critical junctures, namely the Laeken Declaration of 2001, the Nice Treaty of 2003, the Constitutional Treaty of 2004 and the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, which are sequenced in time and causally linked. The three institutions are path dependent in this process, leading from the Laeken Declaration to the Lisbon Treaty. As a result, the treaties have produced changes in institutional behaviour, which have affected EU development assistance towards Sub-Saharan Africa positively. However, due to the institutional issues produced by these changes, the result is not as positive as it could have been. Overall, the EU is one step closer to achieving its goals.