Fighting Corruption with EU Funds in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article critically assesses the effectiveness of the European Union’s financial support, channelled through the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA), in advancing anti-corruption reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). It investigates how EU-funded interventions have influenced institutional capacity, prosecutorial effectiveness, and governance outcomes in a persistently fragmented political context. Drawing on qualitative analysis of official EU reports, GRECO evaluations, project documentation, and case studies of high-profile corruption proceedings, the study combines an institutional lens with a policy-outcome framework to evaluate impact. The findings reveal that, while IPA assistance has facilitated strategic planning and capacity-building, its transformative potential remains constrained by systemic governance weaknesses, limited political ownership, and the inconsistent enforcement of anti-corruption measures. Institutional fragmentation, low absorption capacity, and selective prosecution continue to undermine sustainable progress. The paper argues that for EU support to yield enduring results, it must be more directly tied to measurable enforcement benchmarks and embedded in context-sensitive strategies that foster domestic reform ownership. By situating Bosnia and Herzegovina’s anti-corruption trajectory within the broader dynamics of EU conditionality in the Western Balkans, this study contributes to scholarly debates on external governance promotion and highlights implications for the future design of pre-accession support mechanisms.