''...THE CONSULTANT WILL FIX IT...''

Sammanfattning: Since the end of the 1999 war, Kosovo has received high flows of development assistance, thus becoming among the top beneficiaries per capita worldwide. The EU is the largest donor to Kosovo that aims to support the country’s development as well as the EU accession process. Despite the fact that development must be, primarily, autonomous, i.e. which cannot be imposed, but rather must come from within, no one in Kosovo discusses the influence of externally driven development actions through assistance on the country’s incentives for autonomous development. In this spirit, the study tries to explain how EU development assistance affects the Government of Kosovo’s incentives for autonomous development. The study finds that, first, the EU applies a direct approach, service-buying, and high reliance of the assistance in external experts; whereas, second, the Government of Kosovo’s ministries lack the motivation to engage and capacities to absorb the assistance. As a result, the EU assistance ends up doing the work for ministries instead of building their capacities for self-development, thus turning into a ‘safety net’ for recipients by covering the consequences of their inaction. These two problems constrain the country’s incentives for autonomous development.