In recent years policy coherence for development (PCD) has become a key principle in international development debates, and it is likely to become even more relevant in the discussions on the post-2015 sustainable development goals. This article addresses the rise of PCD on the Western donors' aid agenda. While the concept already appeared in the work of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in the early 1990s, it took until 2007 before PCD became one of the Organisation's key priorities. We adopt a complexity-sensitive perspective, involving a process-tracing analysis and a multi-causal explanatory framework. We argue that the rise of PCD is not as contingent as it looks. While actors such as the EU, the DAC and OECD Secretariat were the 'active causes' of the rise of PCD, it is equally important to look at the underlying 'constitutive causes' which enabled policy coherence to thrive well.
This paper seeks to contribute to the debate on the European Union (EU)'s distinctiveness as an international actor. In particular, it examines whether there is anything distinctive about the international development norms promoted by the EU. Previous studies have indicated that in the field of development policy the EU is predominantly a 'norm taker', meaning that it has to a large extent translated development aid norms originating from other donors, including the World Bank, into its own development policies. However, in recent years the EU has arguably become a more mature, ambitious and professionalized development actor, which explicitly aims to take the lead on the international development front. Therefore, this paper assesses whether the EU is still taking on development aid norms originating from the World Bank, generally considered a leader in international development thinking, influencing many other donors, including the EU. The paper does so by focusing on the development areas of governance, aid effectiveness and the social dimension of development. Importantly, the paper situates 'norms' at the specific level of 'policy ideas' (as opposed to 'programmatic' and 'philosophical' ideas), since normative differences between the EU and the World Bank -if any -might be translated differently by the two actors. Accordingly, the paper hypothesizes that both substantially and procedurally the EU has been stepping out of the shadow of the World Bank.Based on the findings presented in the paper, it appears that in the three areas studied the EU has effectively made a shift away from being a pure norm-taker from the World Bank, and towards becoming a more distinctive development actor, at least to some extent. Indeed, the paper finds that since the 2000s the EU and the World Bank have increasingly developed a different interpretation of the concepts of governance and aid effectiveness and the social dimension of development, both in terms of substance and procedure.2
This article studies the impact of the European Union (EU) on the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD). While the literature thus far has focused on the external challenges for the DAC's role in international development, this study argues that the EU should be taken into account as well. By focusing on the cases of policy coherence for development and the concessionality of official development assistance (ODA) loans, we show that the EU poses a structural challenge for the DAC's role in international development given the strong overlap in membership between both institutions and the Union's changing nature as a development actor.
Since the 2000s, the proliferation of Global Health Initiatives such as the Global Fund have dramatically changed the field of global health. The European Union and several of its Member States have played an important role in the development of the Global Fund and have contributed considerable budgets to it. While the Fund has been successful in fighting priority diseases, it has also been criticized for impacting negatively on countries' health systems, which provoked a debate on health system strengthening (HSS) within the organization. Drawing on a literature review, aid statistics, interviews at headquarter and field level, and document analysis, this article researches the relation between EU donors and the Global Fund, with an explicit focus on the HSS debate. The findings indicate a 'love-hate relationship'. EU donors have loved the Global Fund's innovative institutional setup and its 'saving lives' approach involving quick results. However, over the years they have become more critical about its narrow focus, advocating a shift towards more HSS. Whereas this has been partly successful at headquarters level, most notably the incorporation of concrete HSS commitments in the Global Fund's strategic documents, challenges at local level constrain their translation into funding and implementation measures.
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