Confused Expectations: Decentralizing the Management of EU Programmes

The management of European Union (EU) spending programmes has been the focus of sustained academic and practitioner criticism for many years. One of the fundamental problems has been with the centralist model of control prevalent within the European Commission's (EC) structures. With the demise of the Santer Commission in 1999, the impetus for change was given a fresh urgency through reports from the Committee of Independent Experts and the EC's 2000 reform White Paper. This article explores the nature and content of the reform agenda, focusing on its decentralizing consequences.