Capitalizing on a crisis: the European Union Trust Fund for Africa

How do foreign policies and transnational projects become resistant to critique? This article seeks to better understand the legitimation of policies by studying the work involved in justifying public funding of migration and development initiatives. Government expenditures on migration and development have been increasing in recent years, despite widely shared concerns regarding the merits of such initiatives. In this article, we focus our attention on the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF). The EUTF has been assessed by EU agencies as a successful intervention, while never hiding its inability to achieve demonstrable progress toward its goals of addressing the “root causes” of the 2015–2016 migration “crisis” in the Mediterranean. We argue that this fund was legitimized as a valuable policy intervention through the efforts of European officials and Monitoring and Evaluation experts to, borrowing from Bourdieu, “convert capital”: translate one form of power resource into another form. Based on document analysis and 25 key informant interviews, we trace how EUTF officials successfully converted capital by, first, mobilizing political resources to generate economic capital for migration-related projects in Africa; and second, transforming some of this economic capital into more lasting symbolic capital which justifies long-term migration and development initiatives. In short, money becomes legitimacy. We argue that this “conversion work” helps us to better understand the continued growth and upholding of migration and development financing which consists not only of raw funds but also involves continuous efforts to legitimize these expenditures as inherently valuable policy interventions.