Development Policy Forum - Where is EU aid policy headed?

Against the backdrop of ODA (Official Development Aid) figures showing a significant drop in development aid from the main EU donor countries, European Commissioner Andris Piebalgs confirmed the EU’s commitment to the 0.7 target promised at the G8 summit in 2005, although he stated that reaching the target would be a challenge.

Commissioner Piebalgs pledged to draw up a new document outlining the EU objectives for development aid for the next 7 years.

He added that developing countries needed to take ownership of the Millennium Development Goals and suggested that if the EU focused development efforts on issues instead of countries, they would have more success. “It is important for developing countries to provide a good framework for promoting Foreign Direct Investment”, he added.

Roger Riddell, author of Does Foreign Aid Really Work? made the point that 10 billion dollars of development aid is wasted because of inefficiency. While the EU was a leader, there were too many projects and too many strategies. This approach would be severely tested now that the recent financial crisis had thrown 100 million people more into poverty.

Riddell felt that Member States’ leaders did not feel any real ownership of EU policy, a point agreed upon by a number of other roundtable discussants. What was needed is to engage heads of states in the active creation of a real vision of an EU-wide policy, and to have them apply pressure to ensure its implementation. Non-political actors also needed to pressure politicians to narrow the gap between policy and implementation.

From a southern perspective, donors promote the idea that it was the responsibility of developing countries to implement development, said Simon Stocker, Director of Eurostep and Chair of CONCORD’s Task Force on Institutional Reforms.

The initiator of the meeting and the EP interest group working on Policy Coherence for Development, Franziska Keller MEP (Greens/EFA - Germany), said that more important was coherence at policy level. ‘We need to make development goals a Community responsibility’, she added. Policies such as Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) needed to be coherent with development policy, not the other way around.

For more information: Development Policy Forum

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