This Week in Europe, 19 May 2000
Executive Director of the Caribbean Council for Europe
"The worst agency in the world" was how on May 17 Britain's International Development Minister, Clare Short, exaggeratedly described the European Commission (EC). Her headline grabbing attack on the world's largest aid donor came a day after Europe's External Affairs Commissioner, Chris Patten, had called for radical changes in the way in which Europe delivers its development programmes.
Europe now provides ten per cent of world wide development assistance and when individual EU member states contribution is taken into account this rises to a staggering 55 per cent of the global total.
However despite Europe's pivotal role in international development, its projects experience delays, funds disappear and its officials have had to create convoluted schemes to deliver programmes which have risen so rapidly in number and complexity that they are now beyond the EC's organisational ability. Three simple examples make the point. Nothing of the Euro 200m promised for relief after Hurricane Mitch hit Central America, had been spent two years after the disaster. Contractual payments delayed by years have reduced many small voluntary or non-profit institutions to close to bankruptcy. Organisations in the Caribbean have had to wait years to be paid as funding for agreed and executed programmes has failed to materialise because of the personal animosity of Commission officials to the projects or individuals concerned.
Why this should have come about is hardly surprising. The EC employs the lowest number of officials per capita in relation to the size of its programmes despite having the fastest growing range of development schemes. It is expected to deliver annually huge sums despite having a bureaucracy better suited to administer and regulate the European Community than disburse assistance. It owes large sums of money often going back years. It has to deal with recipient states and organisations which themselves are frequently bureaucratic, slow, and sometimes corrupt. It has an unwieldy political management structure involving all European member states that frequently fail to agree. And it has difficulty in co-ordinating programmes with other donors often because of different or bureaucratic procedures in the other agencies.
Europe's response to this crisis is to set up a new agency that will deliver all European aid programmes. Called unofficially, Euroaid, it will be run by the EC's three external affairs Commissioners. That is to say those responsible for foreign relations, European enlargement and development policy. Beneath them will be a new bureaucracy. The new arrangements envisage that the present geographic departments, such as those in the Development Directorate dealing with the Caribbean give up the delivery of programmes. Instead Directorate Development will in future focus on making strategic policy decisions and determining funding allocations by sector in close conjunction with beneficiary nations. A new body will be established which will be an implementing agency for almost all EU aid programes. To this most, but it seems not all the existing staff in Directorate Development dealing with implementation of programmes will be transferred. This new body will be monitored by a quality support group that will evaluate the delivery of programmes and report to the three External relations Commissioners. In addition EC delegations based in recipient nations will have management responsibilities devolved to them and new working methods will be introduced to increase efficiency.
What the effect of this will be on present problems remains to be seen but judging from first reactions from many Commission officials within the Development directorate there is a sense that divorcing aid policy from delivery will result in years of chaos. More seriously, there is a feeling that this signals finally the end of the special relationship with the African, Caribbean and Pacific states as the ACP within Directorate Development and the new agency comes to be seen as just another part of the world. This is made all the more worrying as last year it was decided to remove the Development Directorate's Trade negotiating capacity to Directorate Trade despite the fact the new Suva Convention calls for EU/ACP negotiations from 2002 onwards on new trade regimes after 2008.
It appears that the latest decision will remove all of the Development Directorate’s ACP country expertise in the delivery of programmes to a new implementing body, based somewhere in Brussels. In other words, what will be left in the Development Directorate will be something akin to a think tank with a global outlook on development policy, with additional responsibility for humanitarian relief and contact with Non Governmental Organisations.
Practically for the Caribbean it will mean that just as the discussions on implementing what has been agreed in the new ACP/EU Convention begin, almost all of the personnel previously involved will be reassigned to a new organisation separated from those who took the key policy decisions during the negotiations. Worse still there is a sense among officials that it will be at least a year before the new agency - of which the ACP will be a very small part - is up and running.
It is also an open question as to what this means for Commissioner Neilson, the Development Commissioner whose small but previously important empire with its special relationship with 71 developing nations has now been emasculated in such a way that it is virtually a sub-division of external relations. It was clear during the recently completed post Lomé negotiations that a significant amount of power had been ceded on trade policy as most of the crucial decisions were taken with the active involvement of the Trade Commissioner, Pascal Lamy. However, few would have imagined that Development's day to day control over implementation of aid programmes for the ACP would also disappear.
Unfortunately this is likely to make more remote the ability of Europe to address rapidly the most pressing development issues in the Caribbean, a region which because of its relative wealth seems increasingly likely to fall, in the long term, outside the scope of most European development programmes. The region needs to be able to increase the velocity of development over a finite period, increase absorptive capacity and move in a relatively seamless way towards economies based on newer industries. This requires a different focus. Employment and development can be stimulated with external support through making manufacturing industry competitive, better integrating tourism, developing education based industries involving information technology and marketing value added products using the unique label Caribbean.
Within DG Development there are many who now understand that such approaches offer the only rapid way out of a return to poverty or the growth of criminality. Time will tell whether Europe’s proposed administrative reorganisation of its aid programmes and Europe’s renewed focus on poverty eradication can find a way to embrace the need for rapid and creative solutions in regions like the Caribbean.