ABSTRACT
Contemporary political relations between the European Union (EU) and Africa are framed within two distinct, though overlapping, discourses, that of governance and of development policy, the joint effect of which is to enhance the regulatory influence of the EU on the countries of the African continent. Since 2000 EU development policy has expanded in scope and content, with an accompanying set of principles on good governance that reflect similar strategies to those of the World Bank in the post-Washington consensus approach. Thus, an internationalizing of EU development policy is recognizable by the shared use of language such as ‘ownership’, ‘participation’, ‘empowerment’, ‘partnership’ and ‘poverty reduction’ (Farrell 2008). While concepts of governance now retain a central position in European internal and external policies, there are notable differences in how the term is deployed conceptually and empirically, across political priorities and geographical areas of interest.
