From an Assistant to a Manager – The High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy after the Treaty of Lisbon 1

The framework for making development policy in the European Union (EU) has gone under a number of substantial changes since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This chapter discusses the framework introduced by the Treaty of Maastricht, which institutionalized the principles of complementarity, coordination, and coherence with the view to improving aid effectiveness and raising the EU's visibility in the international arena. It concentrates on the reform season that begun in the early 2000s. The chapter examines the development section of the Treaty of Lisbon and then focuses on the European external action service (EEAS). It focuses on the debates between the High Representative, the member states, the European Parliament and some development non-state actors on the competence of the EEAS over development policy. By setting in motion the common foreign and security policy (CFSP), the EU sought more actively to become an influential global actor, and a way to do this was to agree on a global development policy.