The Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA) was designed to develop the legislative, administrative, and institutional groundwork for eventual membership. The logic was straightforward: build capacity, and reform would follow. After more than two decades, the honest assessment is that the exercise delivered capacity but not always reform. The Reform and
Anamarija Velinovska
The Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA) was designed to develop the legislative, administrative, and institutional groundwork for eventual membership. The logic was straightforward: build capacity, and reform would follow. After more than two decades, the honest assessment is that the exercise delivered capacity but not always reform.
The Reform and Growth Facility (RGF) for the Western Balkans upends this logic. For the first time in the pre-accession architecture, substantial EU financing, up to 6 billion, is explicitly conditioned on the delivery of measurable reforms, disbursed in tranches against performance, and governed by Reform Agendas that candidate countries must own and fulfil. This is not just a new financial instrument. It is a different theory of change.
The shift matters because it reverses the exercise: rather than financing the conditions for reform, the EU is now conditioning financing on reform itself. This logic is not new within the EU’s own frameworks. The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) applied it directly to Member States disbursements tied to milestones and targets. The Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation extended it further, linking budget access to compliance with rule-of-law standards. The Growth Plan brings this conditionality logic into the pre-accession domain.
This reframing carries a deeper implication, one that the IDM Discussion Paper “From Luxembourg to Copenhagen, to the Western Balkans: Bridging the Rule of Law Gap” helps illuminate. The paper argues that the EU’s enlargement framework has, for too long, assessed candidates against vague political criteria while the EU’s own governance architecture through legislation, conditionality instruments, and an evolving jurisprudence developed increasingly precise and enforceable standards for its Member States. The Growth Plan nudges the pre-accession architecture in the same direction: from broad aspirational benchmarks toward concrete, consequential expectations.
Yet the model remains incomplete. The Growth Plan does tie disbursements explicitly to reform delivery through the Reform Agendas which is a meaningful step. But the quality of those commitments varies. Some benchmarks are genuinely transformative; others risk replicating the old pattern of formal compliance without substantive change. Governments that have mastered the art of reform performance will find ways to satisfy disbursement conditions without shifting underlying power structures.
Without effectiveness-oriented indicators measuring whether institutions actually function as intended, not merely whether legislation was adopted, the connection between money and reform remains fragile.
This is where Pillars 1 and 2 of the Growth Plan become essential, and where their current underdevelopment is most consequential. Pillar 1 opens the path toward progressive participation in the EU Single Market; Pillar 2 deepens the Common Regional Market among the Western Balkans. Both are framed as reform-contingent but that conditionality needs to be made explicit and operational. Financial transfers alone are not sufficient to sustain reform momentum.
Gradual access to EU institutions, Single Market participation, and sectoral integration in areas like energy, transport, and digital infrastructure should be systematically tied to reform delivery and alignment with EU regulatory frameworks. When gradual integration becomes the tangible consequence of credible reform, and not just a long-term promise, the incentive structure changes qualitatively. Candidate governments, public administrations, businesses, and citizens gain immediate stakes in sustaining reform that go well beyond disbursement cycles.
The implications differ across actors. Businesses and citizens benefit from gradual market and sectoral integration directly and are building a domestic constituency for reform. Civil servants gain a professional anchor in EU-aligned benchmarks. Political decision-makers, who currently bear little domestic cost for gaming reform delivery, face a different calculus: when integration privileges are withheld, the pressure comes from below, not only from Brussels.
The 2028-2034 budget cycle presents a defining opportunity to embed this logic. The next Multiannual Financial Framework will be drafted as Montenegro and Albania approach projected accession timelines falling within the budget period itself. Pre-accession support can no longer be designed as if membership is always a distant horizon. It must be built to transition: from reform-linked financing, through gradual integration, to the full responsibilities of membership.
The Growth Plan has introduced the right conditionality grammar. The next budget cycle must give it teeth through genuine accession.
The EU has, in the Growth Plan, demonstrated it can redesign its financial relationship with candidate countries. Whether it has the will to sustain and deepen that redesign aligning it with the rigorous standards its own frameworks now apply internally will determine whether the next enlargement wave produces durable democracies or generation of managed facades.
The article has been prepared within the project “The 3 R’s of EU Integration – Rule of Law, Resilience, and Reform”, implemented by the Institute for Democracy and Mediation (IDM Albania). Supported by a grant from Open Society Institute – Sofia Foundation (OSIS) with the support of Open Society Foundations (OSFs). Responsibility for the contents and views expressed in the publication therein lies entirely with the Institute for Democracy and Mediation (IDM Albania) and in no way can be construed as reflecting the official position of OSIS, OSFs or any affiliated entities.
