The Week in Europe
By David Jessop

"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 Euro200m
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 diferent 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. 

David Jessop is the Executive Director of the Caribbean Council for Europe.
May 19th, 2000  
 


Dr. Amanda Sives
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Caribbean and Caribbean Diaspora Studies
Institute of Commonwealth Studies
28 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5DS

Tel: +44 0207-862-8865
Fax: +44 0207-862-8820
Website: http://www.sas.ac.uk/commonwealthstudies/



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