Paper Titles & Abstracts

The paper tackles two important questions concerning development policies throughout Europe against the background of tight budgets and various financial crises. First, have budgetary constraints and austerity measures across Europe also altered donor preferences for bilateralism and multilateralism, respectively, in development policy? More specifically, do states attempt to resort more intensely to the European level in order to balance budgetary stress and eventually shrinking development budgets at home? The baseline hypothesis is that development policy in general has come under severe budgetary stress and public scrutiny within donor societies in the wake of the financial crisis, as it could be expected that there are increasing demands for enhancing the efficiency of such policies through multilateralisation. Or are there, to the contrary, signs of a "re-nationalisation" (de-Europeanisation) of development policy in the wake of the financial crisis in Europe? Secondly, and related to this, the paper attempts to explain current patterns of development policies throughout Europe as the result of both budgetary stress as well as ongoing securitisation, with the latter arguably enhancing the status of such policies. Does securitisation, in this regard, serve as a device to secure development budgets and to keep development policy on the agenda? A focused comparison of British and German development policies since 2008 is to shed some light on both strands of inquiry.