New Special Issue on the EU’s Global Gateway Initiative
Jointly with Sophie Meunier, Prof. Conceicao-Heldt has published a new special issue in the Journal of European Integration on the EU’s Global Gateway Initiative. In the introductory piece “The EU’s Global Gateway initiative: the geopoliticization of development aid and foreign economic policy”, they demonstrate how the geopoliticization of the EU’s development aid and foreign economic policy happened. To know more just follow the article’s link below:
Heldt, E. C., & Meunier, S. (2026). The EU’s Global Gateway initiative: the geopoliticization of development aid and foreign economic policy. Journal of European Integration, 48(6), 901–921. https://doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2026.2716369
ABSTRACT
The European Union (EU) launched the Global Gateway initiative in 2021 as a strategic pivot in European approaches to development aid and foreign policy amid intensifying great power competition. This Special Issue examines the extent to which the Global Gateway constitutes a genuine geoeconomic innovation or consolidates and rebrands existing development policy with a new framing. Five years after its launch, contributors analyze three critical dimensions: the initiative’s novelty as an economic security instrument; its implications for intra-EU institutional balance between the Commission, Member States, and European Parliament; and its impact on the EU’s positioning in great power competition vis-à-vis China’s Belt and Road Initiative and U.S. infrastructure partnerships. Drawing on empirical analyses of flagship projects, financing mechanisms, Team Europe coordination, and perceptions across the Global South, this collection advances understanding of the EU’s geoeconomic turn and its capacity to act as a geopolitical actor in global infrastructure finance.
In a second piece, together with Robert Basedow and Sophie Meunier, they study how the EU implemented the Global Gateway Initiative via Team Europe by adjusting the governance structure through enhanced intergovernmental coordination but without supranational centralization, what they term constrained governance adjustment. To read more, just klick the following link:
Basedow, R., Heldt, E. C., & Meunier, S. (2026). Team europe goes Global Gateway: how China’s geopolitical rise affects EU governance in development and infrastructure financing. Journal of European Integration, 48(6), 1011–1031. https://doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2026.2715686
ABSTRACT
While existing research explains how China’s geopolitical rise caused the enactment of the EU’s Global Gateway (GG) Initiative, this paper examines how the EU adjusted its governance of development policy. European integration scholarship suggests four possible responses to exogenous pressure: additional supranational delegation, greater intergovernmental coordination, institutional status quo, or disintegration. Drawing on primary research and elite interviews, we argue that geopolitical competition with China has not produced a transfer of competences to the supranational level. Instead, it has accelerated coordination without delegation: member states and EU institutions have developed new mechanisms that reorganize how the Union formulates and delivers development and infrastructure finance. Empirically, the paper documents how the GG was implemented via Team Europe, producing institutional adaptation without supranational centralization. Theoretically, we identify when geopolitical pressure favours tighter intergovernmental coordination over supranational delegation, particularly in domains with fragmented competences and strong member-state preferences for visibility and bilateral ties.
