Between ambitions and realities: The pathway of European Development Cooperation since Maastricht

As soon as with the Treaty of Maastricht, the newly founded European Union formally stated a broad development cooperation approach in the supranational treaties. Since then the overall institutional framework has been continuously improved in favour of development cooperation by both, legal acts and 'soft law' while implementation of development policy issues mostly has lagged behind. Based on an evaluation of the changes on the institutional layer, the analysis will provide few selected evidence, that from a political view European development cooperation has failed to meet its rather high ambitions.