The limits of external governance: implementing EU external migration policy

The European Union's (EU's) attempts to extend its policies into non-member states have been conceptualized as ‘external governance’ and have become particularly visible in projects towards neighbouring countries. The article shows the theoretical limits of the external governance approach for assessing their implementation and argues for adopting an organizational perspective to overcome these limitations. It distinguishes macro-political, distributional and organizational factors and their influence on implementation of external policies in order to evaluate the empirical limits of external governance. External migration policy is used as a test case to assess implementation dynamics of a EU priority towards Ukraine and Morocco. Rather than a story of policy transfer, this article indicates that distributional and particularly organizational factors draw out the limits of EU external governance in non-accession countries when engaging in concrete external action.