Abstract
ABSTRACT The EUTF aims to address the ‘root causes of migration’ by providing development assistance to countries of origin and transit. While it is allegedly based on scientific evidence, scholarly consensus suggests that development assistance is ill-suited to address irregular migration – which is something that some of the actors who designed the EUTF were aware of. We advance a new framework for understanding the emergence and success of pseudo-causal narratives (i.e., narratives relying on unproven and/or disproven causal claims) in EU policymaking. Using frame analysis, we argue that the pseudo-causal ‘root causes’ narrative was adopted against better evidence because it was plausible, compelling and had been used in EU external migration policies before. Faced with the salience of migration and the urgency to act in late 2015, and due to the absence of any clear ideas of what other measures could work, EU actors adopted this narrative to demonstrate that they were actively responding to the ‘crisis’. The narrative met little contestation, since it met the concerns of both those who were keen to stop migration and those who wanted to preserve the core of previous EU development policy.
Highlights
At the European Union (EU)-Africa summit in Vienna in December 2018, European Parliament President Antonio Tajani proclaimed: ‘We need a Marshall Plan for Africa worth €50bn [...]
The paper is structured as follows: following a brief review of the literature on theuse of evidence in policymaking, we present our theoretical framework on the construction of pseudo-causal narratives, drawing on the literature on framing and policy narratives
Through a frame analysis of the ‘root causes’ narrative, we have argued that the narrative was successfully enshrined in the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF) because of several factors lying in the narrative itself, namely that it was cognitively plausible, morally compelling, and had been previously established and used without much contestation among the actors involved
Summary
At the European Union (EU)-Africa summit in Vienna in December 2018, European Parliament President Antonio Tajani proclaimed: ‘We need a Marshall Plan for Africa worth €50bn [...]. Our interviews suggest that those who were most aware of the ‘migration hump’ literature were to be found mainly among EU and national bureaucrats, in DG DEVCO and in domestic Development Ministries and Divisions, while the political level of the Commission and within Member States and sometimes actors with a background in Justice and Home Affairs were often unaware, buying more into the ‘root causes’ narrative (Interview_COM_1; Interview_PermRep_4; Interview_PermRep_5; Interview_Perm_Rep_7) Those in DG DEVCO who were aware of it raised this several times in the context of the EUTF’s adoption; they were not listened to: ‘We tried to advise our people regularly that evidence shows that there is a “migration hump”, but it didn’t take root, it was not what they wanted to hear’ (Interview_COM_1). The very inaccuracy of the ‘root causes’ narrative, served to reconcile the need for talking about migration control while largely acting to preserve the core of development policy (Brunsson, 1989)
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