The ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly Seen by its Members: Empowering the Voice of People’s Representatives?

This article examines the role of the European Union's (EU) Joint Parliamentary Assembly (JPA) with the Africa-Caribbean-Pacific (ACP) group of states. Bringing together 105 countries from four different continents and characterized by a more than forty-five-year long continuity and a high degree of institutionalization, the JPA is a unique institution in the EU's network of inter-parliamentary diplomacy.

Despite its increased importance in the past decade, the role of the JPA remains understudied in academic literature. The analytical framework for examining this role consists of two parts. While the first part is based on a document analysis and expert interviews, the second part investigates the JPA members' own role conceptions by means of semi-structured interviews with delegates from the European Parliament and national ACP parliaments. We argue that the role of the JPA is (1) to advocate the empowerment of the ACP national parliaments, (2) to socialize parliamentarians towards a democratic culture, and (3) to monitor the implementation of the Cotonou agreement. The conclusion reads that, while the role of the JPA has been strongly extended, there are some serious endogenous and exogenous problems that have a major impact on its activities and its influence.

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