Institutional Capacity Building: Extending Conditional Distributive Instruments

Abstract

Institutional or administrative capacity building. aims at improving national administrative systems. The capacity of national administrations was subject to monitoring during enlargement. The regulative elements were backed by financial and technical assistance from the EU. The Commission directed money into the candidate administrations in the conditionality-based pre-accession context and with reference to country-specific goal definitions negotiated in the Accession Partnerships. At the same time, the perception for administrative reforms of national bureaucracies was in ascent more widely. In this vein, some member states requested financial assistance from the Commission, which led to first pilot programs targeted at the cohesion countries. It was accordingly possible to frame the policy outside the Copenhagen framework either in the regulatory arena to harmonize national legislation along the lines of common standards or as soft regulation and more open coordination along these lines. Moreover, continuing the pre-accession assistance as financial and technical assistance in the distributive arena was feasible. This leads to the following expectations: If framed in terms of binding common administrative standards, no spill-in should be expected; spill-in should emerge if the standards developed during the pre-accession phase are framed along the lines of soft regulation or as a distributive policy offering financial or technical assistance.