This article traces the role of the EU institutions in the process leading up to the EU-Turkey Action Plan and EU-Turkey Statement. The EU-Turkey deal is the proverbial 'orphan' in EU crises management, with none of the key actors and institutions eager to claim ownership. Yet when judged from the perspective of process management, the deal resulted from effective inter-institutional collaboration, which stands in stark contrast to the EU's handling of the relocation schemes or the Dublin

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... . Using insights from the informal governance literature, the article maps the inter-institutional network that managed this process, traces the activities within the network, and determines the effects these had on the final outcome. On an analytical level, the mechanism contains five key elements of informal institutional governance: linking, bridging, shielding, laying out the tracks and creative fixes. The conclusion reflects on the wider applicability and scope conditions of this mechanism. KEYWORDS EU institutions; refugee crisis; EU-Turkey relations; informal governance This article contributes to the ongoing debate about the role and influence of the European Union institutions in managing the major crises of the last decade: Eurozone crisis, refugee crisis, and Brexit (Becker et al. 2016; Nugent and Rhinard 2016; T€ ommel 2017). We provide an in-depth process tracing analysis of one of the main episodes in the management of the refugee crisis; the coming about of the EU-Turkey deal, which consists of the EU-Turkey Joint Action Plan (JAP) of 15 October 2015 and the EU-Turkey Statement of 18 March 2016, which sought to engage with Turkey in a number of issue areas to stem the flow of migrants across the Aegean Sea. The general impression, both in Brussels and in the literature, is that the institutions were struggling to stay on top of developments during the CONTACT Sandrino Smeets