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The European Union (EU) is often understood as a normative power. However, based on a case study of European policy networks in Vietnam, this article shows that despite the EU's commitment to norms and transformative development, norms are not a priority in the implementation of development policies. Rather, norm promotion is delegated to political and diplomatic representatives, whereas development and trade representatives are responsible for technical work. Consequently, policy networks created around these four sectors tend to operate separately from each other, undermining the spillover of norms from diplomatic and political networks to development and trade networks. As a result, this article shows that the structural-institutional separation of sectoral policy networks is one of the EU's systemic characteristics that restrict normative policy coherence for development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]