Agency and governance in European Union international development

The European Union's actorness in international development has been mainly approached from the perspective of EU foreign policy studies, by accounting for the type of power that the EU institutions have aimed to project around the world. Turning this theoretical puzzle upside down and starting from an analysis of indirect governance in EU aid policies, the current article unveils additional instances of EU agency, such as the EU as a policy facilitator and as a policy interpreter. The theoretical argument builds on indirect governance theories, a novel theoretical tool that has not been previously used for analysing EU international development actorness. Empirical examples include regional programmes in Latin America and show how delegation and orchestration as mechanisms of indirect governance have been used by the European Commission in order to continue playing a relevant role in a complex and changing international development context.