International cooperation

Global inequality within countries and between the global North and South continues to rise. Yet, there is insufficient public financing and local leadership in development cooperation.

Adequate international public finance is vital to support countries with limited domestic resources, but many European countries are still far from fulfilling their commitment to spend 0.7% of their gross national income (GNI) on development aid and, when they do, development cooperation principles are not always respected.

In fact, international cooperation and development assistance are increasingly challenged by donor-countries’ self-interests. Unfortunately, the current trend in Europe is to spend aid on migration control, to promote its commercial and economic interests and to increasingly rely on private financing rather than directing public financing to people, countries and sectors that need it most.

The development sector has generally taken a top-down approach, engendering unequal power dynamics. Development donors have often failed to engage sufficiently with pluralism, to valorise marginalised non-Western knowledge (including female knowledge, knowledge of the rural population and traditional leaders) and to enable the leadership of local communities in development initiatives.

There is also an inadequate response to climate change. Many countries are failing to rethink their policies in line with the transformative principles of the 2030 Agenda and to foster synergies between economic, social and environmental policies. It is important that there is policy coherence so that decisions made in the EU do not undermine global efforts to fight climate change and people’s wellbeing in countries outside Europe.

The current economic models of the global North mean that it takes a bigger piece of the pie and that the right to development of others is not fulfilled. Global ecological breakdown is being driven almost entirely by excess growth in the global North, including Europe, while the consequences hurt the global South and people experiencing poverty and exclusion disproportionately. On top of this, the promise of green growth and the transition to “green”, renewable energy is representing a new phase of exploitation of people and nature in the South, as the export of raw materials from Latin American and African countries to satisfy markets and the “green transition” in the industrialised North is causing much harm locally.

Our vision is “think globally, act locally”, and for development cooperation to revalue different types of knowledge and to foster local communities’ self-reliance, autonomy and leadership.

We challenge the imbalance of power and the legacies of racism and colonialism in the development sector. We take upon ourselves and want the EU to work to reduce global imbalances and to support and amplify transformative initiatives within social movements, in local communities and in indigenous cultures that focus on the wellbeing of people and planet.

Based on the key values of solidarity, social justice, equality, common good and simplicity and sufficiency, we work to encourage policy makers to:

• Ensure that human rights remain at the forefront of the EU’s international cooperation;
• Analyse global challenges through the longer-term lens of sustainable, inclusive and locally led development, looking at the structural changes that are needed in areas such as energy, climate, food systems, migration, business models and forms of global governance that leave no-one behind;

• Support and promote transformative initiatives such as agroecology, social economy, debt cancellation, loss and damage and reform of development finance institutions;

• Enforce the 0.7% of GNI commitment without further delay, with quality resources focused on tackling the root causes of poverty and inequality and realising people’s human rights;
• Restore the integrity of development aid, ending any type of conditionality. Official development aid should only serve to support the capacity and interest of partner countries and not donor-countries’ own interests in the areas of migration, security or commercial expansion;
• Ensure that any instrument to promote private sector engagement in development brings extra value for the partner country, is transparent and is carried out through a meaningful participatory process in which the local community’s right to free, prior and fully informed consent is safeguarded;
• Create an enabling environment for local civil society engagement through sufficient political space and adequate funding.