The EU and Donor Coordination on the Ground: Perspectives from Tanzania and Zambia

Abstract

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.

Costs, Benefits and the Political Economy of Aid Coordination: The Case of the European Union

“…which mostly show little evidence of impact (see, for example, Delputte and Söderbaum, 2012;Bigsten, 2013;Delputte and Orbie, 2014). Thus, the main question posed in the present article is: How do we explain the discrepancy between the aid effectiveness rhetoric on the one hand and insufficient levels of coordination performance on the other?…”

“…Fourth, donors need 'visibility' (Vollmer, 2012;Delputte and Orbie, 2014); for example, in a high-profile political transformation context donors might consider visibility to be a high priority. Coordination at the implementation level in terms of pooled aid modalities and especially harmonisation may result in a reduction of donor-specific visibility.…”

“…In addition, there may be important differences in the issue of 'EU identity' where Eurosceptic countries may be more reluctant to 'sail' under the EU flag. Or, as Delputte and Orbie (2014) argue, the political shift to the right within EU MS has made them less conducive to agreement and more prone to pursue individual interests. In this regard, although the introduction of differentiation as regards country allocations has involved a certain degree of cross-country coordination, this has only affected EU institutions' development cooperation, not MS'.…”

China in Africa: What challenges for a reforming European Union development policy? Illustrations from country cases

“…International discussions on development policy in the early 2000s provided a window of opportunity that the EU has used in at least two ways . The EU has been an important driver of the international aid effectiveness agenda (Carbone, ) and it has subsequently used principles and agreements in the aid effectiveness agenda to improve European collective action (Delputte and Orbie, ). A number of policy initiatives, such as the European Consensus (), Division of Labour (2007), the Operational Framework on Aid Effectiveness (Council of the European Union, ) and most recently the Joint Programming exercises (see Carbone, this special issue) have sought to improve coordination and coherence among the EU institutions and member states’ development policies.…”

An end to Nordic exceptionalism? Europeanisation and Nordic development policies

“…Regarding the actual implementation of aid policy on the ground, there is little evidence of major change due to EU co-ordination efforts (Delputte & Orbie, 2014; see also Carbone, 2013). Aid implementation being highly decentralised in the Nordic states (Selbervik with Nygaard, 2006), these countries' development offices and embassies in developing countries have become sites of considerable expertise.…”