A 20-page thunderclap hit European development watchers this week when Politico published the European Commission's draft vision for how its development policy should look for the next five years.
However, anyone “truly shocked" — as the NGO confederation CONCORD claimed to be — by the document’s plan for development assistance to be recast as “investment” in a three-part offer (together with trade and macroeconomic assistance) to countries in the global south has not been paying attention. The commission has been talking like this for years.
Even the chair of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee admitted in a December 2022 interview that “there has never been, in history, ODA [official development assistance] that has not had some kind of foreign and security policy objectives.”