Using, Promoting and Shaping Europeanisation Through Projectification: The Case of Higher Education Institutions

Abstract Actors who benefit from the European Union's (EU) opportunity structures strive to expand EU policy‐making. A central manner of benefitting from EU opportunity structures is the acquisition of EU funding, which then is implemented through projects and has led to research concerned with the projectification of EU public policy‐making. Whilst the European Commission explicitly encourages EU funding beneficiaries to participate in the interactive set‐up of EU policy‐making, a bottom‐up perspective on projectification in EU public policy is lacking so far. To answer the question of how the implementation of projectified policies feeds back at EU policy‐making, a theoretical framework is developed that combines a projectification perspective with bottom‐up Europeanisation research. The framework provides three potential modes of leveraging projectified EU policy: re‐using EU project funding, promoting its availability and pro‐actively shaping EU policy. Applying the framework to analyse how higher education (HE) institutions leverage EU project funding, this study finds that HE institutions do not only re‐use and promote the opportunity structures that let them foster their co‐operation but that they also become shapers of EU policy. The finding that EU funding beneficiaries may become EU policy shapers has important implications for EU policy‐making, which increasingly relies on the bottom‐up engagement of (sub)national‐level actors.