The EU development dictionary: An essential guide to Brussels jargon

In a blaze of donor outreach, your boss takes you on a trip to Brussels to shore up your organization’s funding future. Cue endless meetings with urn-based coffee, still and sparkling water in strangely patterned bottles, and lots of blue-and-yellow badges granting access to elevators that lead to liminal corridors. Everyone brings notepads but no one writes in them. And as for the content, it’s like another language. But, somewhere in here, isn’t someone deciding how to spend billions in official development assistance? So, while you wait for the deputy DG at the end of the passerelle (the walkway, not the treaty mechanism … nevermind), here’s our A-Z guide to European Union development policy. AAR The annual activity report of the European Commission’s development department. Immerse yourself in this 52-page overview of everything the EU’s Directorate-General for International Partnerships, or DG INTPA, gets up to each year. Want more? Try the 404-page staff working document. Too hard? We recommend skipping to the annual management plan which can be handy at telling you everything the commission is planning to do, sometimes well before they announce it in a hail of social media posts. Budget support On paper it’s simple. “Direct financial transfers to the national treasury of partner countries engaging in sustainable development reforms” is how the commission defines it on its website. In practice, officials tell us, it’s always political. Look no further than the EU’s strained relationship with Ethiopia — where Brussels froze budget support in late 2020 to express its opprobrium over the conflict in Tigray — to see how the prospect of this kind of assistance is used to delineate BFFs (like Rwanda) from something less (like Zimbabwe.) The Cushion Designed to help the commission expect the unexpected, this €9.53 billion (about $10.5 billion) of unallocated funding for EU external action for 2021-2027 is meant to cater for “unforeseen circumstances, new needs, emerging challenges or new priorities.” The thing about unallocated pots of money, though, is that pretty quickly everyone wants a piece. In other words, the cushion is often the subject of a scramble among the commission’s various departments — all of which can mount a convincing argument that they don’t have enough money to keep up with global needs. DEVE Pronounced “dev-eh,” this is the development committee of the European Parliament that is supposed to scrutinize the EU’s foreign aid spending. Sadly, the regular hearings are sparsely attended; most members are usually on their phones, with a few actually following the issues they are supposed to, and three and a half years after the chair, Tomas Tobé, told Devex that he intended to generate more political dialogue, there is still no way to force the invited officials from the commission and elsewhere to answer direct questions. Rather, invitees generally receive a barrage of often irrelevant or pre-prepared observations from members and then give a sweeping answer touching on whichever ones they feel like answering. EDF The 11th and last European Development Fund was a €30.5 billion pot of money paid into by EU states outside the European Union’s main budget, and used to support countries from the African, Caribbean, and Pacific group of states. For 2021-2027, the EDF (or FED in French), has been brought under the EU’s main budget tool [see NDICI]. Unused EDF resources usually return to member states, unless the countries agree to a commission proposal to spend the money elsewhere. For instance, that’s what allowed the commission conjure a €600 million plan to tackle the global food crisis in 2022. FPI The Foreign Policy Instruments arm of the European Commission is charged with managing certain pots of EU external spending, notably the controversial European Peace Facility. (Controversial because the “peace facility” is actually designed to help the EU send sometimes lethal equipment to allies at war around the world.) The European Peacebuilding Liaison Office reports in this spicy EU advocacy guide that FPI is the outcome of an institutional struggle between the European External Action Service — the department launched in 2011 to act as the EU’s diplomatic corps — and the commission, over who would manage which funding instruments. Global gateway Launched in December 2021, this is the label the commission now gives almost all of its development work in an effort to be, or seen to be, more geopolitical and provide a counternarrative to China’s Belt & Road Initiative. Whether it amounts to more than a label is still up for debate, but if in doubt, put the hashtag on your tweets anyway. The commission will be pleased. Werner Hoyer The outgoing president of the European Investment Bank is a wily political operator with a past stint as Germany’s deputy foreign minister for the liberal Free Democratic Party. He is not afraid to lob a few grenades, either, such as when he returned to the idea in a speech this February that the EIB’s external lending branch, EIB Global, should become a fully fledged subsidiary. INTPA Aka the Directorate-General (the department) for International Partnerships. Formerly known as DEVCO and before that EuropeAid, this is roughly the EU equivalent of USAID. That is, a thousands-strong bureaucracy of people charged with planning and administering the commission’s development assistance budget. Organigramme fanatics, see here. Likes: info points, action plans, the Sustainable Development Goals. Dislikes: the EEAS. INTPA staffers often like to gripe, rightly or wrongly, about the EEAS’ lack of development nouse. Joint Programming See Team Europe. Koen Doens Aka “the DG.” As director-general of INTPA, Doens is in charge of getting the department to execute the political calls of the day, all while following the geographic and thematic spending targets in its legally binding budget regulation. A former chief spokesperson for the commission and professor of Latin and Greek, his weapon of choice is metaphor. If you hear commission staff talking about “golden nuggets” (neglected sectors where EU funding could have a transformative impact in low-income countries), now you know why. Probably the most important development official in town. Janez Lenarčič The political appointee in charge of the commission’s humanitarian aid and civil protection department, ECHO, the Slovenian is that rarity among commissioners, a career diplomat rather than a politician. His role is not immune to politics though. He crossed swords with INTPA, notably over Afghanistan, where the development department preferred to retain control over the commission’s roughly €1 billion seven-year allocation for the country — even once the Taliban took over, making much development cooperation impossible. And he has also begun to build the EU’s own Humanitarian Response Capacity, moving Brussels into territory traditionally occupied by large international NGOs and the United Nations. MIP The multiannual indicative programs set out the commission’s priority areas in each country and amounts of funding for each. This time around, the MIPs only cover the period 2021-2024, in anticipation of what the commission promises will be a rigorous midterm review. NDICI The EU resolved to give their seven-year €79.5 billion budgetary instrument for development a catchy name that rang out around the world. Then they called it the Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument, or NDICI (pronounced N-DICKY or N-DEE-CHI, depending on one’s European roots). In an attempted last-minute salve, the moniker “Global Europe” was tagged on at the end, triggering even more confusion. Hence, we have even seen “NDICI-GE” in the wild. 😳 Operational board One of the most important meetings you probably never heard of happened in December last year when the Operational Board of the European Fund for Sustainable Development Plus convened in Brussels to assign €6.05 billion in budget guarantees from EU taxpayers to mostly European development banks. The idea is that the banks will use the money to back profit-making projects in places that would otherwise be too risky. Details are scarce for now. We tweeted which banks will work across the different commission-set themes, like connectivity and MSMEs. And we lodged an access-to-information request with the commission recently to try and find out more about December’s board meeting. Stay tuned. Post-Cotonou When the post-Cotonou Agreement between the EU and 79 African, Caribbean, and Pacific states was initialed in April 2021, Jutta Urpilainen (see entry below) called it a “new and comprehensive partnership,” “a major political achievement,” and “a turning point” expected to be “game-changing in strengthening the EU's bilateral relations with each individual [ACP] State and their respective regions, positioning the [ACP]-EU partnership as an international force to advance common ambitions on the global stage." Then nothing happened for two years. Now, for reasons probably unrelated to Post-Cotonou, Hungary has said it will lift its objection to the deal being signed into provisional application. That will be a relief to the OACPS and the commission, but it does not address the larger malaise. San Bilal, a senior executive at the European Center for Development Policy Management think tank, echoed a common view when he told Devex recently that post-Cotonou represents little more than the “concerns of a Brussels bubble about an old framework which ‘doesn't want to die.’” Quorum Aka what is often lacking at meetings of EU development ministers in Brussels. A quorum is the minimum number (14) of ministers from the 27 EU countries required in order to conduct official business. These Foreign Affairs Council (Development) gatherings only happen twice a year and are meant to provide debate and coordination between Brussels and EU member states. Back in May 2019, the development ministers of France and the Netherlands wrote a letter to the commission, seen by Devex, urging them to use the meetings to “deal more strategically and in a more forward-looking manner with issues regarding EU external action in the area of development over the long term.” However, we hear these are still usually fairly formulaic affairs. That’s worthy of interrogation in itself, but much to our chagrin (and despite our objections) the EU institutions have stopped holding press conferences afterward. RELEX As in relations extérieures or external relations. This can refer to the Working Party of Foreign Relations Counsellors (a group of officials from EU member states that meets to work on topics linked to EU spending abroad, including sanctions). But it can also refer to meetings of the RELEX group of commissioners responsible for topics outside the EU’s borders. Spotlight Worth €500 million, the Spotlight Initiative was the EU’s attempt to champion multilateralism and reproductive health in the dark days of the Trump administration in the United States. The money, divvied up between various U.N. agencies, went on programs fighting violence against women and girls. Now, with the EU’s initial support all having been allocated, the U.N. is keen for more. The study the Spotlight secretariat wants you to read on their work is this one, by Dalberg Advisors. Another one — which Urpilainen wants to see before greenlighting more funds — is currently being worked on by the (notoriously harsh) EU Court of Auditors. Team Europe Basically, it all boils down to the idea that in a given country, the European Commission, European Investment Bank plus the French, German, Spanish and Italians etc. should all be talking to each other and planning their development work together. Sounds obvious? You would think. But the commission has been trying to get EU states to act more coherently for years. So-called Team Europe Initiatives are in some ways the successor to a process known as Joint Programming. The difference between the two was once explained to us like this: Joint Programming is everyone agreeing to work in different areas, whereas Team Europe is everyone agreeing to work in the same or connected areas, for greater impact. The ECDPM think tank argued recently that Joint Programming had become too long and bureaucratic. But with more than 150 Team Europe Initiatives and counting, a recent internal study, seen by Devex, found that TEIs are at risk of going the same way. Jutta Urpilainen “The commissioner.” A former Finnish finance minister, Urpilainen is the political appointee in charge of the commission’s development department for the 2019-2024 period. Likes: education, youth engagement, civil society, Finland — having declined to rule out returning to domestic politics before the end of her current term. The Finnish presidential election is in January 2024. Ursula Von der Leyen Aka “The president.” The 2019-2024 boss of the European Commission is an ephemeral presence in European development policy. Like most of her predecessors, it is hard to shake the impression that on the rare occasions that she thinks about EU foreign aid, it is as a counterpoint to China [see Global Gateway]. Her 2019 promise to listen to Africa was knocked off course by COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine. Now the Global Gateway — pitched as a response to Beijing’s Belt & Road Initiative — is said to be very much her baby. So much so that she left a few noses out of joint when she went to Senegal on the eve of the February 2022 EU summit with the African Union and announced that €150 billion of the €300 billion Global Gateway would benefit Africa. The commission still has not explained how she arrived at that number. And chances are they never will. Wise Persons Group A group of development finance experts, convened by French leader Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel in a June 2018 communique, that triggered years of shadowboxing between the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development over who should lead Europe’s development lending. The result — partly interrupted by COVID-19 — was a fudge known initially as “status-quo-plus,” even though the said experts, led by the former Eurogroup Working Group head, Thomas Weiser, prescribed anything BUT the status quo when it came to how the EU should have more impact with its development finance. XXXX The letters used in internal documents when the commission has an idea of an amount of money to achieve something but is not sure if and how much member states are willing to chip in toward making it a reality. Youth Action Plan The commission recently launched a Youth Action Plan, designed to provide an “operational roadmap for engaging young people in EU external action” that “will improve the way we work for and with young people worldwide.” It’s all about a “seat at the table” for youth, they say. We will be watching for evidence that EU funding decisions are truly influenced by future generations. Zzzzzz The sound coming from stuffy committee rooms when the jetlag kicks in during the after-lunch session. Make sure you claim your per diem in the morning.