Using Development Aid as a Leverage in the EU’s External Relations: Challenges and Consequences

This study interrogates the drive for leveraging development aid to address non-EU countries’ cooperation on migration governance. It demonstrates that using development aid and financial conditionalities might turn out to be counterproductive, especially when considering that growing competition between traditional donors and emerging donors reduces the scope of governing migration through (conditional) funding. Moreover, patterns of interdependence are today so much embedded into a broader framework of strategic interactions that exerting pressure to bear on non-EU countries might have unintended consequences on the external action of the EU and its member states.