In light of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015, the EU founded the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (‘EUTF’) to address ‘root causes’ of migration through preventive measures in countries of origin. EU policymakers adopted this framing of aid as a tool to prevent migratory movements even though it contradicts the broad academic consensus that development makes migration more likely. To understand how the misleading ‘root causes’ narrative gained political traction, Natasha Zaun and Olivia Nantermoz assess how EU policymakers created the assumption that development aid reduces migration flows in their recently published article “The use of pseudo-causal narratives in EU policies: the case of the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Africa”. The frame analyses demonstrate that policy actors used the ‘root cause’ narrative against better evidence in order to signal that the EU actively responded to the ‘crisis’. It allowed the European Commission to rally support and reassert its legitimacy at a time when criticism over its inability to resolve the internal struggles became increasingly strong. The findings imply that even technocratic actors, which are expected to base their work on expertise and knowledge, strategically promote unwarranted causal narratives to legitimize their role politically when they are under pressure
