Why EU democratic governance support keeps failing, and what it would take to change that
Authors
The EU’s support towards democracy abroad has always been part of its external action, but its implementation gap is big. Amandine Sabourin argues that this is mainly political and explains the failures and root problems.
Democratic governance is consistently placed at the heart of the EU’s external action strategies and funding priorities, only to be quietly overshadowed by other priorities once implementation begins. The main reason for this does not lie in technical shortcomings: wrong indicators, insufficient training or weak monitoring frameworks – it is largely political.
I have spent the recent months thinking about this, contributing to the Team Europe Democracy (TED) training programme, including a video module on democratic governance mainstreaming, facilitating a session at the European Partnership for Democracy annual conference and reflecting on the 5th TED Network Annual Meeting. Here is what the evidence shows and how things could change.
The root problem: Strategy without courage
Effective support for democratic governance has never depended on a single EU instrument, nor can it be reduced to one funding line or programme. It works when different channels reinforce each other. Policy dialogue can create the political space for reform. At the same time, standalone democracy-related programmes can protect and support independent civil society; thematic programmes can respond to more sensitive challenges as they are not linked to the country level; and mainstreaming across geographic envelopes can ensure that democratic principles are embedded in the design and delivery of sectoral cooperation programmes, rather than treated as add-ons. ECDPM has shown that these modalities are complementary, leaning on each other and when one disappears, the others are weakened.
What is often missing, however, is the political will to connect them into a long-term approach and to hold on to it even when the context becomes challenging. Not all democratic principles face the same political headwinds. Participation and inclusivity tend to be welcomed by partner governments as evidence of responsiveness. Accountability, transparency and pluralism are more politically contested: they limit what power-holders can do and expose what they have done. Supporting civic demands in contexts where public speech is restricted can put activists at risk.
Such tensions can result in diluted implementation of EU programmes and a reactive posture. EU action is often triggered by specific events, such as a journalist arrested, a law limiting NGO operations or an election manipulated, rather than a proactive strategy for protecting and expanding democratic space.
It becomes clear that democratic principles survive implementation only when they are built into operational decisions, resource allocations and accountability mechanisms from the start, not when they are listed as values in a preamble.
Three failures that explain the implementation gap
Our research across Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia identifies three structural failures that explain why democratic governance principles keep disappearing during implementation.
The political economy gap is the most fundamental. Most interventions are designed without a serious analysis of who benefits from the current arrangement, who has an incentive to support reform, and who will resist it. Democratic governance principles are designed for an ideal world but implemented in a real one. A political economy analysis is not a methodological luxury, it is a precondition for any intervention that intends to survive contact with reality.
The ecosystem gap is closely related. There is a persistent tendency to engage the same established CSOs and known human rights defenders, while the broader civic space ecosystem (trade unions, local journalists, youth movements, religious leaders, diaspora networks and women’s rights organisations) remains under-mapped and inconsistently engaged. When a familiar partner is shut down or co-opted, an intervention with no broader relationships has no fallback. Investing time and resources in mapping this broader ecosystem before a crisis narrows the options is essential.
The strategy gap compounds both. Tools and instruments exist, but no coherent framework connects them into a longer-term approach at the country or regional level. The result is that democratic governance support is episodic, where it needs to be structural, and shallow where it needs to be embedded. The EU’s growing emphasis on economic and strategic interests only deepens that gap: when the political attention and resources go to infrastructure and trade deals, the incentive to work on democratic governance is weakened, especially since the impacts are slower and longer-term.
It becomes clear that democratic principles survive implementation only when they are built into operational decisions, resource allocations and accountability mechanisms from the start, not when they are listed as values in a preamble.
The MFF as a test
All of this makes the ongoing negotiations for the 2028-2034 EU budget (the Multiannual Financial Framework, or MFF) particularly relevant. The dedicated thematic envelope that backs democracy, civil society and human rights under the current NDICI - Global Europe has disappeared from the proposed Global Europe Instrument. Democratic governance is now expected to be mainstreamed across a single flexible instrument whose stated priorities pull in a different direction, at precisely the moment when member states are cutting aid for democracy support projects and the US is withdrawing from large parts of the global democracy support landscape.
It would be tempting to treat this as an instrumental problem that would be fixed by restoring the envelope. But our research has shown that you could have a dedicated democracy envelope or target and still use it poorly, without political economy analysis, without investing in the right partners, without a clear timeframe and strategic objectives.
What makes the current EU budget moment particularly risky is the combination of factors converging at once: the loss of a dedicated envelope, a mainstreaming provision that risks being too vague to anchor sustained action, and a GEI political ethos strongly oriented toward visible, measurable gains for the EU. Each of these, taken alone, is manageable. Together, they create conditions in which the three gaps our research identifies (the political economy gap, the ecosystem gap, the strategy gap) are likely to deepen rather than narrow.
This concern seems to be shared across the democracy support community, with International IDEA’s early recommendations and a coalition of democracy organisations calling on the European Parliament to re-introduce spending markers and targets for democracy in the GEI. The choices embedded in the Global Europe regulation over the coming months will determine the conditions for democratic governance support through 2034. To be effective, EU democratic governance support needs to remain high on the agenda, including through dedicated funding, and be genuinely integrated into the mutual benefits agenda. But visibility and integration without political commitment are not enough. The MFF is not (only) a technical exercise. It is the moment when the EU decides, for the next seven years, whether democratic governance is a political priority or a rhetorical one.
The views are those of the authors and not necessarily those of ECDPM.
