A Bridge Too Phare? EU Pre‐Accession Aid and Capacity‐Building in the Candidate Countries

Abstract

The imminent large-scale EU enlargement raises important questions regarding the success of Phare as one of the Pre-Accession Funds in preparing candidate countries' institutions for Structural Funding, the need to reform EU regional policy itself, and to what extent the Commission is using Phare to build regional-level institutions and shift an enlarged EU towards multi-level governance. Despite some successes, Phare will not be able to deliver everything it was set up for, and a coherent set of post-accession transition policies will need to be set up as part of the next reform of the Structural Funds to ensure that the process of learning and adjustment leading to the adoption of the "acquis" does not stall with the new membership. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.

The Unintended Consequences of Democracy Promotion: International Organizations and Democratic Backsliding

“…This was due to the fact that there were too many post-communist states for the EU to provide adequate aid to all. Thus, while the EU had more extensive accession requirements for the post-communist states than any previous candidate states, it also had less funds available to offer these countries for implementing these requirements (Bailey and de Propris, 2004).…”

The Impact of Expansion on European Union Institutions

“…The wording of the twinning manual "reflected the Commission's eagerness not to repeat some of the mistakes which have tarnished the reputation of other Phare-funded projects in the past: namely, the vagueness of objectives, difficulties in monitoring progress and evaluation, and the reliance on expensive short-term western consultancy with few concrete results (Mayhew 1998: 138-50;Bailey and Propris 2004)" (Papadimitriou and Phinnemore 2004: 624). From 1999 onward, twinning was to support the capacity building for the implementation of the acquis, such as agriculture and fisheries, environment, structural funds, social policy, public finance and internal market, justice and home affairs, transport, energy, and telecom.…”

Europeanization, Conditionality and Domestic Change: The Twinning Exercise and Administrative Reform in Romania

“…1 The wording of the 1998 twinning manual reflected the Commission's eagerness not to repeat some of the mistakes which have tarnished the reputation of other Phare-funded projects in the past: namely, the vagueness of objectives, difficulties in monitoring progress and evaluation, and the reliance on expensive short-term western consultancy with few concrete results (Mayhew, 1998, pp. 138-50;Bailey and de Propris, 2004). For these reasons the new initiative was not designed:…”