Fit for creating partnerships of equals with the global south? Tensions in the EU’s development policy post-2020

ABSTRACT

The European Union seeks to adjust its external policies to the shifting challenges of the international order. As part of this adjustment, the European Commission headed by Ursula von der Leyen embarked on a mission to revitalize and reconfigure its partnership with the African continent and the ACP group of states. According to the EU, the era of donor-recipient relations is over. The core of this effort is a novel and more flexible financial instrument for external relations. In this article, we shed a critical light on the implicit tensions in the EU’s approach for creating a more effective and equal international development policy post-2020. We develop a theoretically anchored and empirically relevant conceptualization of partnership and show that the EU’s reform of its budget for external action entails a shift towards more domination instead of a partnership of equals with the global south.

KEYWORDS:

• Partnership
• EU development policy
• global south
• justice
• Global Europe instrument

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Aline Burni, Maurizio Carbone, Véronique Dimier, Niels Keijzer, Jan Orbie, Pascaline Winand and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Cf “Partnership in Africa: The Yaoundé Association” (European Community Information Service, 1966).

2 Henceforth we use the term “NDICI – Global Europe instrument” and “NDICI” interchangeably.

3 Until 2020 known as the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific group of states (ACP). Henceforth we use the term ACP to refer to this group of states.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported as part of the LEGOF project at ARENA, a research project financed by the Research Council of Norway (grant agreement no 288707).

Notes on contributors

Johanne Døhlie Saltnes

Johanne Døhlie Saltnes is a post-doctoral researcher at the ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo. She received her PhD from the University of Oslo in 2019. She has published The European Union and Global Development: A rights-based development policy? (Routledge 2021) and articles in the Journal of Common Market Studies, Cooperation and Conflict, Third World Quarterly, Global Affairs and the Journal of European Integration. Saltnes’ main fields of interest include EU external policies, EU–Africa relations, global justice theory and human rights sanctions.

Sebastian Steingass

Sebastian Steingass is a senior academic assistant at the European Interdisciplinary Studies Department, College of Europe, Natolin campus. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Transnational Networks and EU International Cooperation: In Pursuit of Effectiveness (Routledge 2021). His research interests include policymaking and governance in the European Union, EU external relations and international development cooperation.