From leveraging disagreements to seeking consensus: Linda McAvan's 'unusual job'

Linda McAvan has an unusual job for a politician. Instead of looking to leverage partisan disagreements, she spends her time searching for consensus. McAvan is chair of the influential Committee on Development of the European Parliament, a post she assumed following the 2014 parliamentary elections. “In Westminster, the job is all about looking for difference, whereas in our job it’s the opposite,” she told Devex at a recent European Year of Development event at the EU House hosted by Bond, a network of U.K.-based nongovernmental organizations. “You’ll have a proposal on the table, and you need to create the maximum consensus to get that through, so you need to know where people are coming from.” McAvan has been a member of the European Parliament since 1998, and much of her political career has been focused on the environment and climate change. Development, she said, is a far more challenging field, where not all the necessary legal frameworks are clear or even in place — which is “certainly the case” for the U.N. Summit to adopt the post-2015 development agenda in New York in September. “Development is more fluid — you haven’t got laws on the table — so you have to identify strategic priorities and get people to sign up to them and try to influence the big decisions that are being taken at that moment,” the DEVE chair said. A huge task Those big decisions and strategic priorities include the EYD — an initiative McAvan sees as a chance for the bloc’s NGOs and citizens to push MPs on reaching agreement at the third International Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa next month, followed by solid outcomes at the U.N. post-2015 summit in New York and the 21st Conference of Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris. “We have European ‘Year of’ every year, and we don’t want it to end with lots of warm words. These major meetings are an opportunity to leave a legacy,” McAvan said. Getting the EYD moving has been a huge task, as there were no plans in place when McAvan took up the chair’s role in earnest after the summer hiatus last September. “I’ll be very blunt. It had been decided just before the elections to have a European Year of Development, so when I came back in September and asked ‘where’s the plan?,’ there wasn’t one,” she said. McAvan said another of the committee’s big priorities is to ensure policymakers are fully briefed on what will be expected from them at the U.N. summit in New York and the COP21 climate conference in Paris — as well as the broader links between the Addis Ababa, New York and Paris meetings. She recalled meeting, at the European Development Days in Brussels, a representative of one of the key governments that will be represented in New York. The official was concerned that discussions around the sustainable development goals mainly involved development — and not finance — ministries. “That made me sit up and think we are going to have to work hard this summer to make sure world leaders aren’t being given these 17 targets and 169 subtargets a week before New York,” McAvan said. “Politicians have a lot on their plates and react when someone points something at them, so our development ministers really have to start selling this to their finance ministers now.” 3 strategic priorities Looking ahead to 2016, the committee has three big strategic priorities, the DEVE chair said. The first is to bridge the gap between development and humanitarian aid, which are in two separate silos at the European Commission. “I hadn’t understood that before I became chair,” McAvan admitted, adding that she now understands the problems that governments and implementing agencies face due to gaps between emergency aid and long-term development financing, particularly in the education sector. “At the moment, the majority of children in refugee camps don’t get access to education, and there is resistance in countries with a lot of refugees to accepting permanent development aid because they don’t want refugees to become permanent fixtures,” she told Devex. But with refugees spending an average 17 years in camps and resettlement sites, a child can miss out entirely on getting good education. “One of the priorities for next year will be initiatives around education of refugee children,” McAvan said. “We also want to see the development and humanitarian commissioners working much more closely together, and ensure better handovers from one to the other so there aren’t any gaps as we look toward the World Humanitarian Summit next year in Istanbul.” The two kinds of budgets in the EU — commitments and payments — is another problem that needs to be addressed. The DEVE chair said the committee is “lobbying” to unify the humanitarian aid budget. A third priority will be greater scrutiny of the commission’s new Gender Action Plan, McAvan said. “The way these working documents are put before ministers, they don’t go through the scrutiny system of a normal work program such as you’d see in an environment context, for example,” she said. “We are told that the plan will be adopted in October, so there’s not a lot of time, but I don’t want a gender action plan unless women on the ground are aware it exists because it’s actually making a difference. When you make a change, people should feel a change.” Weighing in on the debate In the U.K., McAvan’s Labour Party has yet to choose a leader to replace Ed Miliband — who stepped down as party leader following Labour’s loss at the May 7 election — and she said it was too early to discuss how Labour might pressure the new Conservative government on development-related issues now that it is no longer in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. “There’s an official [Conservative] position on the 0.7 percent, but there’s already some conversation on what should count as aid, so it’s early days. I hope we don’t have a breakdown of consensus,” she said. “From a European perspective, we need to keep aid levels high, and keep leading on these issues and remain a player.” But McAvan also pointed to another debate within the U.K. on whether it should remain a member of the 28-member-state EU, which also has implications for development. “I don’t think the public realizes that when we talk about what the EU spends on aid, a lot of that money is channeled through U.K. development agencies,” she said. “When Oxfam, Christian Aid and Save the Children are doing the work that makes them household names, they’re doing it with EU money, and a lot of the work that’s been done to fight Ebola is EU money as well. According to the DEVE chair, the U.K. would not have been able to coordinate the aid coming into Sierra Leone — as it did — if it weren’t part of the EU. McAvan also warned the U.K. would lose much of its influence in international development talks if it was outside the EU bloc. “[The U.K. Department for International Development] is one of the leading development departments in Europe, so to lose that role would be bad for the whole of European development policy because we’d lose that influence — around development aid but also around wider influence,” she stressed. “When ‘the EU’ goes to negotiate in these big international forums, it’s illusory to think that if the U.K. isn’t part of it, it would still have a big voice, because the Chinese, the Americans want to talk to the EU and if we’re not in it, we’ll be sitting outside the room trying to find out what’s been decided and trying to hitch a ride,” McAvan concluded. Check out more insights and analysis for global development leaders like you, and sign up as an Executive Member to receive the information you need for your organization to thrive.