With the increasing reliance on development finance to mobilise resources and catalyse private sector initiatives and finance at scale for greater sustainable development impact, a parallel impetus has emerged to foster more coherence and synergy among development actors. The European Union (EU) is at the forefront of this endeavour. Collectively a major economic powerhouse, and the world’s largest provider of official development assistance (ODA), the EU is engaged in a process of combining its various tools and objectives towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A key means to realise this objective is greater coordination between donors, implementing agencies and financial institutions for development – i.e., development finance institutions (DFIs) and public development banks (PDBs).
Building on the Team Europe and ‘Working Better Together’ approaches, the ‘policy-first’ principle, and European values and objectives, the EU is giving new impetus to coordination efforts – to take full advantage of its budgetary and policy frameworks, with a view to strengthening the European financial architecture for development (EFAD). Key elements of this architecture are ‘Global Europe’ – which is the EU’s Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument (NDICI) – and the European Fund for Sustainable Development Plus (EFSD+).
An important question in this endeavour is how coordination between the roles and activities of European donors, implementing agencies and DFIs/PDBs can best be articulated and implemented in practice. This note draws insights from coordination experiences of a range of European actors, including the European Investment Bank (EIB), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. Specifically, it synthesises lessons from case studies carried out by members of the European Think Tanks Group (ETTG) for the Practitioners’ Network for European Development Cooperation.
Read the analyses study here.
Read the case studies here:
Italy
European Bank for Reconstruction Development – EBRD
Authors: San Bilal and Karim Karaki (ECDPM) with contributions by Elise Dufief (IDDRI), Niels Keijzer (IDOS), Iliana Olivié and María Santillán O’Shea (Elcano)
The synthesis report is summarising parts of the series of analyses covering 8 European case studies (Germany, France, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, the European Investment Bank -EIB and the European Bank for Reconstruction Development – EBRD).
Presentation of the study here.
ETTG study conducted for the Practitioners’ Network for European Development Cooperation.
Photo by Shwetangi Gupta on Unsplash.
The views are those of the authors and not necessarily those of ETTG.
