Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 25th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview VI. Public Policy Analysis Development Author(s) Omar Scharifi Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH Berlin Germany Bihler Tobias, Title European Union’s Twinning Instrument as a Means to Build Up Capacities of Public Administrations - A Stocktaking of Its Impact Evaluation File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Omar Scharifi Abstract 2018 is going to be the anniversary of 20 years of the EU Twinning Instrument as one key element of the European neighbourhood policy and the support for accession countries to adopt the Union Acquis. Such a long period of time provides good conditions for an assessment of outputs and outcomes to understand, if it meets the given objectives. The article shall provide a stocktaking of some existing key data of evaluations of outcomes and impact (e. g. Evaluation of the Institutional Twinning Instrument in the Countries covered by the European Neighbourhood Policy of European Union /HTSPE Limited in 2012). The article investigates in how far the instrumental framework conditions of the EU Twinning Instrument promote or hinder the achievement of reform outcomes (length of projects, long-term orientation of objectives etc.). Each project is the result of a negotiation between the beneficiary country with its governmental institutions and the European Union’s Delegation. In return for the EU’s financing of external administrative expertise, the EU partner country’s administration is supposed to contribute to the achievement of the agreed mandatory results. Problems in the sense of the principal-agent theory may occur, as the beneficiary may be interested in the provision of external expertise from a member state, but not in the output it committed itself to towards the EU delegation. This research intends to list the main work that was done in evaluation of EU-Twinning, and describes, as part of this endeavor, the approach and the procedure that are applied by the EU COM to evaluate the instruments IPA and ENI as a whole and on the basis of their single projects. It lists potential shortcomings of its evaluation and its strengths. And lastly, it formulates on the basis of the findings of this investigation some challenges for evaluation and suggestions to respond to them.