Team europe goes Global Gateway: how China’s geopolitical rise affects EU governance in development and infrastructure financing

While existing research explains how China’s geopolitical rise caused the enactment of the EU’s Global Gateway (GG) Initiative, this paper examines how the EU adjusted its governance of development policy. European integration scholarship suggests four possible responses to exogenous pressure: additional supranational delegation, greater intergovernmental coordination, institutional status quo, or disintegration. Drawing on primary research and elite interviews, we argue that geopolitical competition with China has not produced a transfer of competences to the supranational level. Instead, it has accelerated coordination without delegation: member states and EU institutions have developed new mechanisms that reorganize how the Union formulates and delivers development and infrastructure finance. Empirically, the paper documents how the GG was implemented via Team Europe, producing institutional adaptation without supranational centralization. Theoretically, we identify when geopolitical pressure favours tighter intergovernmental coordination over supranational delegation, particularly in domains with fragmented competences and strong member-state preferences for visibility and bilateral ties.