Publication

This text looks at how the EU funds its external policies on migration, border control and asylum seeking. After describing the different funding instruments the EU has in place to deal with this three-part problem, with a particular emphasis on migration-related projects in third countries, the paper’s author concludes that Brussels’ funding landscape is fragmented and incoherent, but that the incoherence is understandable given the broader political, sociological and institutional struggles at play. The author therefore argues that a certain degree of incoherence is an inevitable characteristic of EU governance in the migration area and that the more concrete challenge is to account for how the money is being spent.