Brussels puts the ‘strategy’ in sustainable development

What is European Union development aid for? The sales pitch for the bloc’s new Belt-and-Road-beating “Global Gateway” investment plan is based on green and digital infrastructure investments designed to make the EU a geopolitical partner of choice, particularly in Africa. But at least 93% of the spending under the regulation underpinning — in the absence of commitments from member states — the plan’s promised investments must be eligible to be counted as official development assistance. That balance between soft power play and tackling poverty is clear in the opening sentences of the regulation — the €79.5 billion Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument, or NDICI. Its first general objective is to “uphold and promote the Union’s values, principles and fundamental interests worldwide … thus contributing to the reduction and, in the long term, the eradication of poverty.” Everyone sees what they want in the text, which emerged from debate with European civil society organizations, among others. “People will be starving, and we will build traffic roundabouts with ‘Team Europe’ logos on each side. … It is crazy.” --— An EU member state official For officials like Michele Cervone d’Urso, the head of International cooperation and financing instruments at the European External Action Service, and Markus Berndt, the acting managing director at EIB Global — the European Investment Bank’s new development branch — the focus now is strategy. Cervone d’Urso told the European Parliament in February that the Global Gateway is “beyond development aid, of course.” “It’s how we project ourselves in third countries. It's how we project our value-driven approach, how we work with like-minded [partners]. Actually, it’s far beyond NDICI now,” he said. "We are not throwing the [United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals] out the window, of course. They remain at the forefront of everything that we do,” Cervone d’Urso said. But he added that EU institutions should increasingly be judged on how they champion the bloc’s geopolitical agenda. Meanwhile, Berndt told the same hearing that “there is not a trade-off between SDGs and pursuing our political priorities as a union.” Berndt said, “In a perfect world, you could say, we all come together in a democratic U.N. General Assembly, we vote on the global public goods, and then we let the specialized agencies like the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and World Bank develop them and implement them.” He added: “Unfortunately, I think we do not live in this world. We are in a world where global politics is very much dominated by regional economic powers, like China, the U.S., and hopefully and to some degree the European Union.” “Our approach is to pursue the EU headline priorities and the SDGs in a combined manner,” a European Commission spokesperson wrote to Devex. And the Global Gateway “projects European objectives, values and standards, in a manner that brings sustainability to connectivity challenges at all levels, with the SDGs as a shared reference framework with our partners.” For some, a more geopolitical EU approach to foreign aid is now inevitable, like it or not. “For us, it’s quite clear that the [EU] development policy [is] really a part of the external policy now, and it’s really part of the wider political landscape,” said Tomas Tobé, the chair of the development committee in the European Parliament, at this month’s European Humanitarian Forum. “That could sometimes be a bit challenging … for this community. … But it’s just something that we need to acknowledge.” However, others warn that the strategic focus risks forgetting the role of development assistance as a means to try to achieve the SDGs by 2030. An EU member state official told Devex this week that the bloc’s current direction of travel must be corrected. “People will be starving, and we will build traffic roundabouts with ‘Team Europe’ logos on each side,” the official said, referring to the moniker that the European Commission is using to label investments by EU states and institutions in an attempt to grow the bloc’s brand recognition. “I think it is crazy.” “It is in [the] mutual interest for us as the European Union and partner countries to ensure that the assistance, the development that we are providing is having an impact,” Mikaela Gavas, a co-director of the Europe program and senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told Cervone d’Urso at the parliamentary hearing. “We will not be able to achieve the SDGs if we are not focused on impact.” Jutta Urpilainen, the EU commissioner for international partnerships, was instructed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the start of her mandate in December 2019 “to ensure the European model of development evolves in line with new global realities.” However, Niels Keijzer, a researcher at the German Development Institute, told Devex by email this week that this must be balanced with the EU treaty obligations, cited in the NDICI regulation, to “contribute to peace, security, the sustainable development of the Earth … [and] eradication of poverty,” as well as “democracy, the rule of law, the universality and indivisibility of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for human dignity, the principles of equality and solidarity, and respect for the principles of the United Nations Charter and international law.” Tanya Cox, director of CONCORD Europe, a confederation of development NGOs, told Devex that climate change and the environment remain high on the EU agenda. But Cox wrote that “the genuine interest in and focus on the SDGs seems to have waned since this Commission came on board.” And she argued that “buzzwords and concepts” such as Team Europe and the Global Gateway were being used to “[instrumentalize] development policy and resources for other policy objectives.” For now, Barry Andrews, the centrist Irish member of European Parliament and a co-author of a draft report on the SDGs, told Devex that there are major deficiencies in the EU’s governance, monitoring, and financing of the SDGs inside and outside the bloc. “No overarching, high-level EU strategy for instance is currently in place. This has a detrimental impact on both European and global efforts to achieve the 17 SDGs,” Andrews wrote by email. “We need to fight against the kind of ‘SDG-washing’ that is taking place to ensure that Agenda2030 is salvaged. The EU has a particular responsibility here.”