BRUSSELS — The new chair of the European Parliament’s development committee wants to shake things up. Four months into the job, Tomas Tobé, a Swedish member of the center-right European People’s Party — one of the transnational political groupings that make up the European Parliament — told Devex he is in talks with the Parliament’s secretariat on how to convert the regular exchange-of-views meetings with the European Commission and other development actors from a “seminar” into a real “political dialogue.”
Devex sat down with Tobé in his Brussels office earlier this month for his first interview as chair of the DEVE committee, the Parliament’s main body responsible for scrutinizing the work of the commission’s development and humanitarian departments.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.