EU states kick the tires of Team Europe plans

BRUSSELS — If you have heard a European diplomat talking about development policy recently, chances are you’ve heard the slogan “Team Europe.” But if you are not sure what that means in practice, you are not alone. European Union member states have some questions too. In April, Team Europe was largely a branding exercise, designed by the European Commission partly to combat China in the public relations battle over the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in low-income countries by bringing the work of the EU institutions, member states, and European development banks under the same social media hashtag. Now, with the EU’s 2021-2027 development planning about to begin in earnest, the commission wants to expand the concept with so-called “Team Europe initiatives.” A draft, seen by Devex, of the commission’s programming guidelines, which will soon be sent to delegations around the world, explains that the initiatives will “promote, under the ‘Team Europe’ brand, ambitious and easily recognisable European flagship initiatives with a maximum transformative impact in partner countries.” The idea is to have a couple of big projects “which really would put the EU in a position of saying ‘OK that’s the EU collected added-value’ in a given country,” Alexei Jones, senior policy officer at the European Centre for Development Policy Management think tank, told Devex. Top development officials from European governments were broadly supportive of the idea at a closed virtual meeting Wednesday. “There has probably never been as much political will [to join forces more effectively] as what we have now,” one participant said. “This is quite unprecedented in the EU development cooperation area." But sources who attended the meeting said there were also questions for the commission: How much of the EU institutions’ yet-to-be-set spending envelope for each country would go to the Team Europe initiatives? And would the other focus areas that will be identified under the conventional programming process suffer as a result? Others included: How are recipient countries being consulted, given that the initiatives’ guiding themes of digital, green, and jobs are taken from the commission’s own strategy with Africa? And how could the commission boast at Wednesday’s meeting that it already has more than 180 possible Team Europe initiatives, when its formal programming process with recipient countries hasn’t even started? The man fielding those questions is Koen Doens, the director-general of the commission’s development department, DEVCO, and the driving force behind the Team Europe idea. On the share of resources for the Team Europe initiative — which one participant understood could be as high as 70% of the total country allocation — Doens told Devex that there is “no real quantitative benchmark. In some countries, you can have sizable impact with a small part.” Doens added that classic development themes such as education and food security would not be neglected as they could also be chosen for Team Europe initiatives. “We could perfectly say in a certain country … food security here is a top issue, instead of doing each and every one of us a little bit, let’s look at it in a coherent way and let’s really design together a big Team Europe initiative that supports a country in tackling, in a comprehensive way, all the elements that contribute to building a better nutrition policy and food security. So it is not true at all that human development will pay a price,” Doens said. The commission arrived at Wednesday’s meeting with half a dozen examples from the more than 180 initiatives that have already been proposed by delegations as potential candidates for the Team Europe treatment. Among them, Doens cited sustainable value chains in the cocoa sector in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, governance, and “last mile” access concerning digital services in Kenya, youth in Mozambique, and decent work in Bangladesh. “It’s not going to be, à la Chinoise, let’s build a railway,” Doens said, adding that by assessing “much more complex issues” such as the regulatory and private sector environment, European actors would together be able to “really leave a mark.” However, the commission’s pre-prepared swag of over 180 possible initiatives also raised eyebrows among member states. “We still have these pesky development effectiveness principles, you know,” one participant told Devex after the meeting Wednesday. “Country ownership and alignment and all this sort of stuff, and there the commission is a little bit wishy-washy I must say.” Doens said that EU delegations had generated the ideas “bottom-up, in-country”, but admitted that “we are nowhere near having even one or two really finalized Team Europe ideas, and most of the 180, I mean, really need to go back to the drawing board. So this is discussing, this is learning.” He also distinguished the Team Europe initiatives idea from traditional joint programming — where European development players adopt a common planning document in line with a recipient country’s priorities. “Plenty of [European actors] will continue to do things separately from a Team Europe initiative,” Doens said. He likened the initiative idea to building a car: “The Dutch will do the wheels, [the commission] will do the [body], the others will do the engine, and we put it together. And that’s different from joint programming.” Another question is governance. “Member states are asking about next steps, how will it work?” a third participant Wednesday told Devex, adding that the commission should expect member states to be closely involved in programming, including any potential special initiatives. Germany, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, is in the early stages of drafting a joint member state position on the Team Europe approach, slated for agreement at November’s meeting of EU development ministers.