EU development policy: evolving as an instrument of foreign policy and as an expression of solidarity

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue on the evolution of European Union development policy, against the background of fundamental challenges that have emerged since the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. The special issue's objective is to highlight the complex dynamics of a policy area that is called on to address the massive challenges of poverty, inequality, healthcare capacity, climate change, insecurity and weak governance in countries of the global south, and at the same time support European foreign policy objectives including political stability, migration management, access to resources and markets. In this introductory article, we attempt to sketch the broad outlines of the conceptual and practical dilemmas faced by a policy area that is supposed to be able to fix almost any problem. We observe that European development policy's evolution is driven by the tension between its raison d'être as a concrete expression of global solidarity and international cooperation, and its increasing instrumentalisation in the service of European economic and security interests. We highlight some of the key challenges that have emerged in the last decade, including rising populist nationalism and Brexit within Europe, the changing nature of relationships between Europe and countries who receive EU aid, and the changing nature of development cooperation itself, exemplified by the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. We outline the specific contributions the articles in this special issue make to research and policy debates on the themes we raise in this introduction. We conclude that the battle between the forces of solidarity and instrumentality has evolved EU development policy into an impossibly complex arena of competing norms, practices and institutions, which raises many open questions for future research.

Evolution of the EU development policy - from altruism to the interest instrumentalism and beyond

“…The third group of motives is environmental, which can be of both altruistic and interest nature, driven by certain political, economic, or strategic interest (Gupta and Thompson, 2010). The discussion on the evolution of the EU development policy in literature follows that typology, and the debate is mostly concentrated on the dichotomy between "moral" and "selfish" motivation, or between "solidarity" and "instrumentality" (see, e.g., Furness et al 2020;Fukuda-Parr and McNeill 2019;Delputte and and Lighfoot 2019;Holden 2020;Szent-Iványi and Kugiel 2020;Babarinde 2019;Hadfield 2007).…”

Shifting priorities of the EU as a development actor: context and consequences

“…Ought EU development policy be defined strictu sensu on the basis of financial input from the EU and quantifiable progress in recipient communities and states, driven by budgets to improve basic living conditions? Or can the policy as a whole be "reconceptualized as an interrelated set of multifaceted economic, environmental, and institutional challenges" epitomized by the SDGs, or set-pieces like the 2017 New European Consensus on Development (Furness et al, 2020). More challengingly, ought EU development policy retain its traditional focus on poverty alleviation as an end in itself, or must it now operate as one of many means to complex ends within EU foreign affairs more broadly?…”

“…These same changes have largely occurred in parallel to the seminal changes of the European Economic Community (EEC) and subsequently the EU itself, as a regional and global actor. The way the EU's development policy has evolved over time has been subject to recent academic study (notably Bergmann, Delputte, Keijzer, & Verschaeve, 2019;Delputte & Orbie, 2020;Furness, Ghica, Lightfoot, & Szent-Iványi, 2020;Hackenesch, Bergmann, & Orbie, 2021a;Saltnes, 2021). This literature highlights that by the early 2000s, EU development policy had evolved to become "a self-standing EU external policy area" (Bergmann et al, 2019) with an explicit legal focus on poverty reduction (Koch, 2015).…”

“…The challenge is that as development transformed from a core policy to a multipurpose "one-stop-shop", it has shifted from "constitut [ing] the core of the EU's external relations" (Steingass, 2020) to a part of the EU's increasingly multi-layered, integrated approach to external action. This approach to development is required to address multiple "root causes", as well as the myriad consequences of poverty, inequality, weak governance, climate change, environmental degradation and unmanaged migration (Furness et al, 2020) and as such is constitutively different from its post-2000 successor in its definitions, budget, designated actors, as well as its implementation and evaluation.…”

Beyond ‘donor-recipient relations’? A historical-institutionalist perspective on recent efforts to modernise EU partnerships with third countries

“…Two months later, the EU and its member states concluded an international agreement with the African Caribbean and Pacific states, the majority of which African, which sought to "reducing and eventually eradicating poverty consistent with the objectives of sustainable development and the gradual integration of the ACP countries into the world economy" (ACP-EC 2000: 7). In the two decades that followed, the EU's development policy sought to reconcile pursuing mutual interest with promoting poverty reduction, or as a recent JCER special issue put it find a balance between its development policy being instrument of foreign policy and an expression of solidarity (see Furness et al 2020).…”