11. Who Owns What? – Free Trade Policies, Migration Management and the Ambiguity of “Joint Ownership”
- Author:
- Sherin Gharib
- Publication Date:
- 12-2019
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Austrian Institute for International Affairs (OIIP)
- Abstract:
- The concept of joint ownership has become a buzzword since the 1990s not only in strategies of international organisations, such as the United Nations (UN), the WorldBank (WB) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but also in European Union (EU)foreign policy (Ejdus, 2017). Since the launch of the European Neighbourhood Policy(ENP) in 2004 joint ownership has been defined as one of its main principles.Accordingly, the EU states that “joint ownership of the process, based on the awareness of shared values and common interests, is essential. The EU does not seek to impose priorities or conditions on its partners” (European Commission, 2004, p.8). It continues by holding that there “can be no question of asking partners to accept a pre-determined set of priorities. These will be defined by common consent and will thus vary from country to country. The endorsement of these plans by the highest instance of the agreements in place will give added weight to the agreed priorities for action” (European Commission, 2004, p. 8). Thus, EU policies should be set within a partnership relation between the EU, and its counterparts and priorities should be defined by common consent. The EU aims to engage “governments and all leading local stakeholders, including national parliaments” (European Commission, 2010c cited in Jonasson, 2013, p. 47). The importance of joint ownership was reconfirmed within the revised ENP in 2015,where the EU has declared that “differentiation and greater mutual ownership will be the hallmark of the new ENP, recognising that not all partners aspire to EU rules and standards, and reflecting the wishes of each country concerning the nature and focus ofits partnership with the EU” (European Commission, 2015a, p. 2). The goal, as the EUhas claimed, is to increase cooperation with neighbouring countries to an eye-to-eye level and to follow an approach based on “both partners’ needs and EU interests”(European Commission, 2017). The revised ENP again acknowledges the importance of involving relevant members of civil society as well as social partners in consultations(European Commission, 2015a, p. 3). Despite the appearance of joint ownership in several EU documents and its use as an example of an inclusive approach, the definition offered remains quite vague. Thus, it is unclear to what extent governments, local stakeholders, civil society and social partners should co-own certain policies. Whose considerations should count and should joint ownership be operationalised within the decision-making or implementation process?How can the operationalisation of the concept be evaluated? This policy paper critically investigates the EU’s concept of joint ownership. Drawing on two case studies, namely free trade policies and migration management, the paper 7PAPERSIEMed. Who Owns What? – Free Trade Policies, Migration Management and the Ambiguity of “Joint Ownership” analyses the implications and limitations of the EU’s partnership relation with its southern neighbourhood. The paper focuses mainly on the Egyptian, Tunisian and Moroccan cases. Due to the vague definition of “joint ownership” and in order to be able to analyse the two case studies, the paper suggests, based on EU documents, two types of ownership: 1) governmental ownership and 2) societal ownership. Using this conceptualisation, the paper analyses the involvement of different stakeholders and the main beneficiaries of EU free trade policies and migration management. It argues that there is a lack of governmental as well as societal ownership within the two EU tools, Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements (DCFTAs) and Mobility Partnerships (MP) as it is mainly the EU that sets priorities, norms and standards to be adopted by partner countries. Government representatives and civil society actors from Mediterranean Partner Countries (MPCs) perceive their relationship with the EUas asymmetric rather than based on an eye-to-eye level (personal communication with Tunisian and Egyptian officials and civil society actors, 2016-2017). The perceived reluctance to fully engage MPCs – government officials and social actors – in the implementation of EU policies has led to their growing mistrust of the EU. If ownership is applied at all, then it is often reduced to a state-centric approach even though the EU is rhetorically attached to the inclusion of actors going beyond the government. The lack of “societal” ownership becomes evident as consultative mechanisms suggested and applied by the EU to include grassroots organisations have in most cases no implications for policy-drafting processes. Thus, there seems to be a gap between what the EU refers to in official documents and the implementation on the ground. In this case, both MPs and free trade policies might exclusively serve the interests of the government and linked elites in the region – this depends on their ability to “own” certain policies rather than addressing the needs at the grassroots, such as poverty reduction or the creation of job opportunities. In this respect, the legitimacy and sustainability of EU policies is at risk (Ejdus, 2017;Dworkin & Wesslau, 2015). The paper proceeds as follows: the first part investigates the concept of ownership,illustrates several dimensions of its ambiguity, and analyses the EU’s operationalisation of the concept. Subsequently, the paper sheds light on the limits of ownership in the realm of free trade policies in general and DCFTAs in particular.The following section investigates the concept of migration management and MPs. The analysis is based on primary and secondary literature review as well as interviews conducted by the author with Egyptian and Tunisian officials and civil society actors, as well as with EU representatives in 2016 and 2017.
- Topic:
- Migration, Regional Cooperation, and Free Trade
- Political Geography:
- Europe, Tunisia, and Mediterranean