By Vince Chadwick

 

BRUSSELS, 30 April. - (ANA) - A leaked “Briefing Book” outlining the European Commission's development vision puts the continent’s strategic interests front and center — which, not surprisingly, has raised the hackles of NGOs that want traditional metrics such as poverty eradication to be at the heart of the EU’s development agenda.

 

A 20-page thunderclap hit European development watchers this week when Politico published the European Commission's draft vision for how its development policy should look for the next five years.

 

However, anyone “truly shocked" — as the NGO confederation CONCORD claimed to be — by the document’s plan for development assistance to be recast as “investment” in a three-part offer (together with trade and macroeconomic assistance) to countries in the global south has not been paying attention. The commission has been talking like this for years.

 

Even the chair of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee admitted in a December 2022 interview that “there has never been, in history, ODA [official development assistance] that has not had some kind of foreign and security policy objectives.”

 

But anyone surprised by the revelations in the draft hasn’t been paying attention, Devex Senior Reporter Vince Chadwick writes. That’s because the commission has been telegraphing its desire to align foreign aid with strategic interests for quite a while. And, spoiler alert, governments already do this. Generosity and geopolitics often go hand in hand.

 

Still, the document is pretty explicit about this realpolitik. It speaks of the need to “[engage] our strategic partners with a policy mix driven by economic interest, and less so by more traditional and narrow development and foreign policy approaches.”

 

It also mentions the need to no longer serve as aid-receiving countries’ “partner of convenience on many niceties.” As Vince points out, it would be nice — and perhaps shocking — to know what the commission considers nice but dispensable.

 

On the flip side, the document could be seen as a practical admission that the commission cannot do “everything, everywhere, all at once,” as it clearly states. This is especially true if spending remains flat in the next budget cycle, forcing donors to pick and choose their priorities.

 

Asked by Devex about the leaked document, EU development commissioner Jutta Urpilainen was circumspect.

 

“We have to have a very balanced and comprehensive approach,” she said. “And it has to be also very much aligned with the SDGs.” - (ANA) -

 

 

AB/ANA/30 April 2024 - - -