Transparency, Accountability, and Participation in EU Promotion of Democratic Governance: The Case of Twinning in the Eastern Neighborhood

• • 
  • Presentation speakers
    • Dmytro Panchuk, Ghent University, Belgium

  Abstract:

  Recent literature on EU democratic governance promotion has already touched on the EU’s ability to diffuse values of transparency, accountability, and participation into the public sectors of the neighboring countries, particularly via transgovernmental cooperation under the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP). However, those works still lack sensitivity over which specific values of democratic governance are being promoted and what determines the presence and possible differences in those values in various EU transgovernmental projects with its Eastern neighbors. Using the Twinning Instrument in the Eastern Neighborhood as a case, this paper first examines whether and to what extent the values of transparency, accountability, and participation feature in the mandatory results, objectives, and activities of the Twinning projects implemented in the region to date. Second, it uncovers variation in the indicators of democratic governance across five countries of the Eastern neighborhood (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine) and across various policy sectors targeted by Twinning. Thereby, it controls for sectoral variables, like sector politicization and technical complexity, and country-based variables, like political environment. Finally, using methods of descriptive and inferential statistics, it assesses those variables and their relative strength in conditioning the variation of democratic governance indicators in the projects under study. The paper relies on a content analysis of 114 Twinning project fiches, as well as on a series of semi-structured interviews with Twinning stakeholders from the EU and the Eastern neighborhood countries for the purposes of triangulation.

 

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