Shedding light on the European Union’s Development Cooperation after Lisbon Treaty

Abstract: The concept of poverty as a development and a security issue has been fairly commonplace since the end of Cold War and poverty has been gaining importance in the security agenda of the EU throughout the years. Thus Lisbon Treaty has legally and instructionally enhanced the Union’s capacities to ensure policy coherence and has given poverty reduction utmost importance among its development cooperation objectives. This study aims to investigate how the Lisbon Treaty changes, particularly participation of the EEAS in the development aid programming, has affected the achievement of the objectives of the EU's development cooperation. Lisbon Treaty has introduced two new bureaucratic bodies with different organizational cultures and missions which are responsible for the EUs development programing; namely EEAS and DEVCO. Considering the EEAS’s leading position in the programming and its organizational values together with the introduced changes of the Lisbon Treaty, this thesis aims to scrutinize whether the Lisbon Process favored or hinder the EU’s efforts to achieve development goals. The operationalization of the theory based stakeholder evaluation on the programming of the European Development Fund provided the necessary information on the actors’ roles, values and missions in the programming phase. The discussions on the criticisms to the EU regarding politicization/securitization of aid may increase on reasonable grounds, but it is also the fact that checks and balances system has already been integrated in the development aid programming by having DEVCO and EEAS involved in the process. In order to achieve the ideal outcomes, regular participation of the DEVCO and coordination should be ensured without allowing any inter-institutional rivalries.