The proliferation of aid donors and channels for aid and the resulting fragmentation brings about huge costs for developing and donor countries and has a detrimental effect on the impact of aid. Coordination is presented as a strategy to help resolve this problem and has been at the top of the development agenda in the past decade. The EU has on many occasions expressed its ambition to foster this agenda and strengthen internal EU coordination. However, the few existing contemporary studies suggest that the implementation of coordination is fairly low. This article seeks to understand this gap through an empirical analysis of EU coordination in Tanzania and Zambia. The findings reveal that the EU's internal and external coordination role has indeed been limited. It is argued that challenges to EU coordination can partly be explained by institutional factors, but that ideational and political elements should also be considered in order to gain a more profound understanding.La prolifération de donateurs d'aide et de mécanismes de développement et la fragmentation qui en résulte génèrent des coûts considérables aussi bien pour les pays en voie de développement que pour les pays donateurs et ont un effet néfaste sur l'impact de l'aide. Au cours de la dernière décennie, la coordination, vue comme stratégie pour résoudre ces problèmes, se situait en haut de l'agenda de la politique de développement internationale. À maintes reprises l'UE a exprimé son ambition de stimuler cet agenda et de renforcer la coordination interne au sein de l'UE. Mais les rares études contemporaines suggèrent que la mise en oeuvre de la coordination a été très faible. Cet article cherche à comprendre ce gap au moyen d'une analyse empirique de la coordination de l'UE en Tanzanie et en Zambie. Les résultats révèlent qu'effectivement le rôle de coordination interne et externe de l'UE dans les pays susmentionnés a été limité. Il est clair que les défis pour la coordination de la part de l'UE peuvent être expliqués partiellement par des facteurs institutionnels, mais qu'il faut aussi tenir compte de facteurs idéationnels et politiques pour arriver à une compréhension plus approfondie.

The European Union's development policy has become increasingly intertwined with other policy fields, which erodes the objectives of this policy domain in their own right. We specifically look at the linkages with migration policy, which has been a highly politicized EU policy domain. This article assesses the EU migration-development discursive linkages by addressing two related questions: how and to what extent has this nexus been politicized in Europe? We focus on two dimensions of politicization, namely salience and the polarization of opinions within the context of national parliaments. Through a conceptualization of argumentation lines this article sheds light on how the nexus has been translated into political communication by political actors. We conclude that there are varying, often opposing, argumentation lines on how the migration-development nexus is conceivedthat are more complex than the distinction between 'preventive' and 'restrictive' approaches as identified in the literature on EU external migration policy.

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The Nordic countries have traditionally been praised for their generous and advanced development policies. Recently, however, it has been claimed that the Nordic model has faded: that the Nordic donors have become more similar to other European donors. One possible reason for such trends is influences from EU policies, that is, Europeanisation. This article critically evaluates such claims by presenting arguments for and against Europeanisation effects. We argue that changes have indeed taken place. The Nordic exceptionalism has been eroded. At the same time, a convergence of European aid policies has occurred. The question is if this is the consequence of Europeanisation -or is it rather a result of Nordicisation (the Nordic countries influencing the EU), or perhaps like-mindisation (a broader set of progressive member states having impact upon EU policies)? We suggest that Europeanisation has been extremely weak while there is strong evidence of Nordicisation but also, and increasingly, of like-mindisation. Today, a core group of mainly northern member states, including the Nordics, are the main driving forces behind European aid convergence.

Background: This article assesses the global health policies of the European Union (EU) and those of its individual member states. So far EU and public health scholars have paid little heed to this, despite the large budgets involved in this area. While the European Commission has attempted to define the ‘EU role in Global Health’ in 2010, member states are active in the domain of global health as well. Therefore, this article raises the question to what extent a common ‘EU’ vision on global health exists. Methods: This is examined through a comparative framing analysis of the global health policy documents of the European Commission and five EU member states (France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Denmark). The analysis is informed by a two-layered typology, distinguishing global health from international health and four ‘global health frames,’ namely social justice, security, investment and charity. Results: The findings show that the concept of ‘global health’ has not gained ground the same way within European policy documents. Consequently, there are also differences in how health is being framed. While the European Commission, Belgium, and Denmark clearly support a social justice frame, the global health strategies of the United Kingdom, Germany, and France put an additional focus on the security and investment frames. Conclusion: There are different understandings of global/international health as well as different framings within relevant documents of the EU and its member states. Therefore, the existence of an ‘EU’ vision on global health is questionable. Further research is needed on how this impacts on policy implementation.