The European Union And Global Development

The European Union is a leading actor in international development, providing more than half of the world's foreign aid, but also a unique case, combining the characteristics of a bilateral and a multilateral donor. Despite the general acknowledgment that policy coordination substantially improves both the effectiveness of foreign aid and the visibility of the EU in the international arena, Member States have consistently resisted any intrusion into what they consider a key area of their national sovereignty. The increases in volume of aid, the ambitious agenda on aid effectiveness, and the adoption of the European Consensus on Development indicate a change of direction. Using development policy as a starting point, this book provides a systematic analysis of the interaction between the European Commission and Member States. It explores the conditions in which the European Commission influences outcomes in the EU decision making process. It ultimately argues that the European Commission plays a leadership role, but this leadership is contingent upon the presence of an institutional entrepreneur, its internal cohesiveness, and the astute use of a repertoire of tactics. Demonstrating that development policy may provide fresh insights into EU integration theory, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of European Politics and International Development.

An assessment of the capacity of the EU to coordinate actors and policies with regards to global development. The authors argue that the EU and its member states have the potential to act for global development when they are able to improve policy and actor coherence, such as through better linking of bilateral and community programmes.

This book systematically analyses the EU’s commitment to a human rights-based approach to development through the lens of global justice theory. It identifies limits to the EU’s approach and discusses how standardised policies, particularly in the case of human rights sanctions, may be perceived as neo-colonially intrusive and can come at the cost of recognizing the experiences and interests of vulnerable groups and allowing for partner countries’ democratic ownership of their own development trajectory. Engaging with primary sources including official documents, reports, and 45 semi-structured interviews with EU and member state officials, the book also presents a novel explanation for why the EU, at times, steps out of its commitment to rights-based development and chooses differentiated foreign policy responses to similar situations. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of EU foreign policy, EU development policy human rights, and international relations as well as policy practitioners working in the fields of development, human rights and democracy promotion.

Designed to replace Martin Holland's The European Union and the Third World, this new text provides systematic coverage of the European Union's policies in relation to the developing world in the 21st century and includes substantial coverage of governance issues and the relationship between development initiatives and European integration.

The principle of policy coherence has been the object of a contentious debate in the European Union’s external relations, though discussions have been mainly limited to its foreign policy and its ability to speak with one voice in the international arena. Despite being institutionalised in the Treaty of Maastricht, policy coherence for development (PCD), which implies taking into account the needs and interests of developing countries in non-aid policies, failed to make headway in the European Union, remaining the unheeded concern of some NGOs and a small group of Member States. A change of direction occurred in the early 2000s when the European Commission, taking advantage of a number of favourable conditions and using an astute strategy, managed to set an ambitious agenda for the European Union. This volume analyses the linkages between aid and various non-aid policies, namely trade, agriculture, fisheries, security, migration, and the social dimension of globalisation. Its aim is to shed new light on the EU’s policy-making process, by looking at the nexus between various policy sub-systems, and on the role that the EU wants to play in the international arena, by looking at the impact of its policies on international development. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration.

This volume offers new perspectives on the evolution of the trade-development nexus in the European Union against dramatic changes in the international context. Without disregarding them, it seeks to go beyond the controversial and extensively researched Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). In particular, it focuses on the reform of the Generalised System of Preferences, the negotiation of various Preferential Trade Agreements, the application of trade sanctions, the allegedly ambitious agendas on decent work, Aid for Trade and aid untying, and the implications of the changing balance of power in global economic relations. Taking diverse approaches and, at times, reaching different conclusions, contributors directly or indirectly address one or more of the three general themes of the book: differentiation, coherence, and norms. This book was published as a special issue of Contemporary Politics.

Events of the past twenty years, including the Cold War and the War on Terror, have meant that the environments of international development co-operation have changed extensively, with dramatic consequences for development policies and North-South relations in general. Perspectives on European Development Cooperation takes stock of such changes, describing and analyzing the new European development agenda, including the role of the European Union. Essays by prominent authorities in the field examine the development policies of individual donor countries and focus on the principles and objectives governing aid strategies and the performances of these policies. This book will be of interest to students of development studies and those involved in determining development policy.

Based on the experience of the author, an IPE scholar and former trade policy consultant at the World Bank (WB), the book offers an in-depth exploration of the EU–WB relations, conceptualized as hybrid delegation. Coupling cross-time analyses of their interaction in the regions of the Middle East and North Africa, Europe and Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa with an original investigation on the coordination among the EU member states at the Executive Board of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development over the ‘voice and participation reform’ of 2008–2010, the book advances an innovative theoretical framework to assess the EU–WB joint institutional and field policy performances. Augmented PA models of delegation, role theory and performance analyses are engaged, and selectively recombined, to investigate the nature, evolution and impact of the interactions of the two organizations, both in their everyday and constituent politics. Hybrid delegation-in-motion is reconstructed, against the background of post-Washington Consensus and post-Lisbon EU, to unveil the changing division of labour between the two largest development multilaterals of the new global context. The book will be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners in European Politics, Development, International Relations, International Political Economy and Global Economic Governance.