Joined-up thinking has become a valuable business management mantra. It’s now being put to work for EU development policy, too, in the first ever European Report on Development which was launched at the European Development Days.

The first-ever European Report on Development (ERD) was launched on 22 October at the European Development Days. The high-profile launch event will be attended by the European Commission’s Director-General for Devel­opment Stefano Manservisi, the Director-General of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) Martin Dinham, Sweden’s State Secretary for International Development Co-operation Joakim Stymne, and several members of the high-level research team which wrote the report. The ERD is a new European initiative which seeks, in partnership with scholars and experts from developed and developing countries, to help shape and influence the European Union’s perspective and policies on some of the most pressing development issues in a changing global context. It is a concrete manifestation of the EU’s commitment, as the world’s largest aid donor, to the Millennium Development Goals.
“The whole idea behind the ERD is to strengthen the European input into the international debate on development,” explains Françoise Moreau, who heads the unit dealing with ‘forward looking studies and policy coherence’ at the European Commission’s Devel­opment Directorate-Gene­ral. “It also seeks to express the European flavour based on the fact that Europe is a global partner, not only from the aid perspective, but also as a trade partner and, maybe most importantly, as a political actor on the international scene.”

Fragile, handle with care
Described as the “toughest development challenge of our era”, fragility is the focus of the first edition of the European Report on Development (ERD). Many Sub-Saharan African countries are in situations which can be described as ‘fragile’. The governments of these ‘fragile’ countries either lack the capacity or the legitimacy to govern effectively, with serious developmental consequences. The root causes of this fragility can be manifold and include conflict, poor governance, weak institutions, etc. Countries experiencing fragility are extremely diverse in terms of their socio-economic and cultural make-up and circumstances, so there can be no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to their development challenges.

Building resilience
The working rationale of the expert group behind the ERD is: “As countries become more resilient, they are inherently less fragile.” But what does this mean?
The idea is relatively simple: more stable countries are generally more resilient to shocks like a global economic crisis, natural disaster or regional conflict, events that might otherwise make them more fragile. Fragility here means they are more exposed to shocks, whether internal or external, economic or non-economic.
Now, while the idea is simple enough, putting together a set of coherent tools and policies to help Africa overcome its ‘fragility’ is an altogether more tricky prospect.
“When dealing with fragile situations [and countries], policy-makers are faced with a series of complex questions,” commented Stefano Manservisi, the Director-General of DG Development and Relations with African, Caribbean and Pacific States, at a meeting of experts invited to Brussels in September to help put the finishing touches on the ERD ahead of its release.
The ERD will largely address these questions, he said, but it will not be easy. He suggested it will take a concerted effort to “mobilise all possible policy tools” to cope with what is happening in Africa, as there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution or policy that covers the diverse situations on the ground.

Room for manoeuvre
In partnership with African countries, the EU is well placed to make a difference. “I think the EU is in a very good position to do something about fragility because there is no one magic policy instrument that works on its own,” noted Paul Collier, Director of the Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of African Economies, at a previous ERD event in Barcelona. “To have a reasonable hope of success, we need to deploy a wide range of policy instruments, including aid, security, governance and trade.”
He added that: “Very few agencies control that full span. For example, the World Bank is essentially an aid agency. It doesn’t have a mandate to move much beyond that. Whereas, because the European Union is itself a sort of government, it spans all the policy instruments... so it is in a position to coordinate their use to bring them all to bear on the problem.”
But this raises massive policy formulation and implementation challenges. “How can we conceive instruments that cope with all this variability?” Manservisi asked the audience. He said he hoped the ERD would “scale-up in a politically-inspired way” and drive the wider aid and development policy space. “It’s beyond fragility,” he noted, “it’s about the broader development challenge.”
This view was shared by Tamsyn Barton of the UK’s Department for International Development, who asked whether the ERD had any message about the current EU policy instruments and whether policy-makers would find what they were looking for in it.Expanding on this point, Giorgia Giovannetti, the ERD’s lead author, suggested Europe needs to reassess its role on the world stage and, thus, work together to tackle some of the biggest challenges to meeting the Millennium Development Goals.
Owing to the diverse needs of the beneficiary countries, development programmes – and indeed the policies that breathe life into them – have to, in turn, be flexible enough to work properly.
Applying the same logic, Giovannetti said the report will be more of a “framework to think” than a policy prescription per se, hoping to avoid the risk it will get bogged down in detail or become dated as conditions change on the ground. However, the country case studies in the ERD will show what sort of priorities can develop out of this framework.

Consistently coherent
The EU strives to ensure that its various policies work coherently – trade policies don’t clash with agricultural policies, aid programmes gel with disease-combating initiatives, etc. – towards a given set of goals, and that includes its vision for development.
This joined-up approach is encapsulated in the ‘Policy Coherence for Development’ (PCD) concept, which is enshrined in the Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty) that entered into force more than 15 years ago. PCD is about making sure that EU policies in one area do not undermine those in another. And all European policy decisions should take account of their potential effect on the Millennium Development Goals.
The second EU report on PCD, which came out in September, assesses the progress being made towards greater policy coherence. According to a statement on the report, development concerns have been integrated in all 12 policy areas which have an impact on poor countries. And in the areas of research, energy and environment, EU policies have been particularly positive for developing countries.
Delegates at the Brussels ERD meeting acknowledged how hard it is to achieve PCD with any degree of consistency because the EU is, after all, 27 different countries with often different mindsets when it comes to development and aid.
Paul Engel of the European Centre for Development Policy Management suggested he would like to see more profound analysis of what the EU is good at and not good at in addressing the issue of fragility, and that the EU code of conduct be prominent in the ERD.
Eugenia Piza-Lopez of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) reflected on her organisation’s efforts to manage its own internal aid activities coherently. “Despite the best intentions, policy is nearly always hampered at the implementation stage – it’s the same for the EU as it is for the UN,” she said.
Meanwhile, Pascal Vennesson of the European University Institute summed up the security-development chapter of the ERD. He said that “for the EU and Member States, development policy really begins at home”. Their aid and development activities could have historical roots, or be aligned with European social models, or could be linked to what they want to achieve or how they want to be perceived internationally, he explained.
He questioned the notion that security and development are joined at the hip and whether the EU should be “continuously engaged” in development activities in Africa, when “selective disengagement” could provide space for “local initiatives to flourish”.

Humility in action
Several delegates stressed that the report and ensuing policy fully respect national sovereignty and demonstrate “humility” and an understanding of the local needs and concerns in fragile African states. They also stressed the importance of not glossing over the colonial legacies and how these may or may not still influence development.
The aid community needs to ask Africans how it can help and “meet us halfway”, said William Aponsah of Georgia Southern University, echoing a remark by another delegate.Meanwhile, Eugene Owusu of the UNDP added a cautionary note: it is important that the EU forges a common approach to helping fragile states build up their resilience to avoidable shocks, he suggested. But he stressed that local actors are critical to successful aid and development initiatives, that the EU should identify key coping mechanism and use them as entry points.
He explained: “It is important that the report and policy recommendations resonate with the African constituency [as well] because Africans must take responsibility in addressing fragility. And what the EU does must be a complement to national efforts.”