11.09.2020 | Ondřej Horký Hlucháň

A comprehensive EU Strategy for Africa. Development, Humanitarian Aid and Climate Change

The European Commission introduced a new comprehensive EU Strategy for Africa in March. In June, a summary document consisting three briefings was published, one on the topic "Development, Humanitarian Aid and Climate Change′′ was written by our senior researcher Ondřej Horký-Hlucháň. It focuses mainly on EU policy towards sustainable development, climate change or migration.

The new EU Strategy for Africa attempts to reflect the continent’s growing relevance within a partnership rather than through a donor-recipient framework. However, this leads to a prioritisation of the formal, productive and technology sectors as well as climate mitigation at the expense of agriculture, informal sector, human development and climate adaptation. With such skewed priorities, this Strategy is ill-adapted for the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Institutionally, political will is needed to ensure that the continent-to-continent approach is not hampered by parallel, contradictory and fragmenting forces within the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP) and the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) governance frameworks. Financially, mutual accountability must be strengthened by joint funding of joint actions. An inclusive institutional mechanism is also needed to promote political and civil society participation as well as policy coherence for sustainable development beyond migration and climate. More generally, the Strategy advances a government-to-government type of partnership at the expense of a more people-centred approach that is more in line with the ‘principled pragmatism’ of the EU.

You can read the full policy paper (all 3 briefings) here: http://bit.ly/EUStrategy_Africa

Ondřej Horký-Hlucháň is a reasearcher at IIR.




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