ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how policy professionals in the UK participated in coordinating and contesting EU policy norms. Although the UK avoided participating in the consensus-seeking with member states, it significantly shaped EU development cooperation until the Brexit referendum (2016). The chapter illustrates how UK policy professionals achieved this for the case of EU aid effectiveness norms. British development professionals became uneasy with the EU’s and the Commission’s promotion of coordination norms since the mid-2000s and instead promoted competing norms as contributions to effective development cooperation. This was based on their priorities of transparency and showcasing results of international cooperation. Advocacy involved wider transnational networks, including societal actors. The goal was not the coordination of an EU policy norm. Yet the engagement of DFID professionals at the EU level, especially during Conservative governments since 2010, in conjunction with transnational organising, contributed to the formulation of an EU policy norm for a results framework.
