Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
2020 was a challenging year for Jutta Urpilainen, the European Commissioner for International Partnerships. In this blog, we look back at the EU’s international development performance and assess the extent to which it has lived up to the EU’s pledge to be a reliable international partner.
On 16th September 2020, European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, delivered her first State of the Union (SOTEU) speech, setting the tone for the rest of her five-year term.
In Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, he divided the world into hedgehogs, who have a singular vision uniting all action, and foxes, characterized by the breadth of their intellectual curiosity and locus of attention. The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office needs to be both hedgehog and fox to fulfill its promise, being able to relate all of its work to its central vision of being a force for good in the world, while retaining the fox’s ability to work on multiple problems in multiple ways.
Last week, the European Commission’s President Ursula von der Leyen unveiled her new proposal for a post-COVID-19 economic Recovery Fund, alongside the EU’s future priorities and budget. But what do the proposals mean for Europe’s role on the international stage?
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s recent reshuffle saw substantial changes to the Department for International Development’s (DFID) and Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s (FCO) ministerial teams, the most striking of which was that the two departments will share all of their junior ministers while each retaining cabinet-level secretaries of state.
This piece was first published by Friends of Europe, please see the original article here.
Earlier this month three future European Union (EU) Commissioners were given the green light by legislators to lead the migration portfolio—despite the fact that the confirmation of the entire Commission is still pending.
Earlier this month, the long-awaited report on the future of the European financial architecture for development was released. Are the report’s proposals feasible? And crucially, do they offer a magic bullet to the intractable state of the European development finance system? I argue that although some of the proposals go some way towards offering a solution to the current problem, politics will undoubtedly trump logic, and we will—at least in the near future—be left with a stalemate.
As the EU considers providing policy-based lending, Mikaela Gavas and Hannah Timmis outline what this support might look like, and discuss what the value-add of the EU Commission would be.
Rory Stewart may turn out to be the shortest serving Secretary of State for International Development in the UK. Charles Kenny outlines the skills and experience that Rory Stewart has brought to the department.
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