By IPS Correspondents
LONDON, Feb 9 2001 (IPS)

The European Commission (EC) has a long way to go before it can fulfill the aims of its newly-articulated development policy, development experts and experts meeting here this week have said.

Experts at the meeting, sponsored by the London Europe Society, blasted the EC for its inefficiency and short staffing, as well as for its myopic tendencies to aim its developing policies only to countries in its geopolitical orbit.

However, they welcomed the EC’s Jan. 30 announcement of a fresh focus and commitment to its development policy, centered on reducing poverty levels worldwide and not just in the regions within and closest to the European Union’s borders.

Recently, the EC expressed its commitment to the goal of reducing and eventually wiping out poverty through “support for sustainable economic and social and environmental development, promotion of the gradual integration of the developing countries into the world economy and a determination to combat inequality.”

Glenys Kinnock, member of the European Parliament and vice chairman of the EU/ACP Joint Assembly, applauded the focus on poverty eradication. She emphasised a need for conflict prevention through addressing poverty, saying “the root of conflict is poverty and the tensions arising from it.”

But Adrian Hewitt, research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, said the Commission had actually been “dragged kicking and screaming because that (reduction of poverty) was what the member states wanted.”

He acknowledged that Europe has always had “if not a development policy, a set of development programmes.” But he said he still had “some doubts” about the consistency of purpose of EU development policy, which he said was not as robust as those of some of its members (like the United Kingdom).

Much of this can be blamed on the EC’s lack of coherence and organisation at top levels, a condition that European Commission director general Peter Pooley described as “too much politics and too little management; in fact, hardly any management at all.”

Pooley faulted the European bureaucratic structures for their historical tendency to not dispense of old policies or procedures, but rather to “simply accumulate precedent piled on precedent, procedure on procedure; controls once implemented were never relaxed, because of the idea that we were ‘building Europe’ and every stone was important, nothing could be thrown out.”

Such a tactic, he added, resulted in “not a very pretty piece of architecture.”

This persistent accumulation has led to inordinate inefficiency in its past, but the EC has recently made several moves toward streamlining its operations, especially in development policies.

Following on the European Commission’s proposal in April 2000 to develop new guidelines for the European Community’s development policy, the EC has expressed consistent interest in expediting the delivery of the EU’s external aid and improving the quality of projects and programmes.

On Jan. 26, European Commissioner for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid Poul Nielsen told a meeting of top U.N. representatives that he wanted the two organisations to cooperate more deeply in development issues. He stressed the need for a shift from the project-based approaches of the past to a more sector-wide strategy.

This was also part of the run-up to the EU-hosted United Nations Conference on Least Developed Countries, set for May 14-20 in Brussels.

On Jan. 1, the EU announced the launch of its Europe Aid office to focus on development.

Kinnock acknowledged the “growing gap between implementation and the crazy bureaucratic structures,” but blamed member states for criticising EC attempts at improvement without contributing solutions or acknowledging their own role in the body’s effectiveness.

She recalled that in their response to the Gujarat earthquake in India, member states were more concerned with outdoing one another in individual contributions rather than cooperating to form a coherent strategy of Europe-wide humanitarian efficiency.

“It’s about time they realised they are also accountable” for Europe’s collective action, Kinnock added.

Currently, more than half of all public aid offered by the EC goes to developing country projects, but that aid has tended in recent years to focus on the Mediterranean countries and Central and Eastern Europe.

This focus has tended to neglect the Africa-Caribbean-Pacific countries in recent years. In 1999, Kinnock noted, Kosovo received four times the amount of aid as the entire African continent.

The EC’s professed shift in focus to poverty eradication is a direct attempt to counter this bias.

Hewitt also noted that the EU’s enlargement to include the former communist countries might derail the EC’s focus on less- developed countries, since none of the candidates slated for the first wave of EU enlargement have a historical interest in development.

The new delegates from those countries in the parliament and council, he said, “have had a generation or two under Soviet orbit, and not seeing anybody from the rest of the world, like Asia or Africa, and are frankly not very enlightened.”

To boost the EC’s force as a giver of aid, Hewitt said that if the Commission wishes to gain credibility as a major donor, cooperation with the Bretton Woods institutions is crucial.

He criticised the “extraordinary” lack of communication between the EC as a development agent and the World Bank, saying that “at the moment, you can write the examples (of cooperation) on two sides of a piece of paper.”

The EC’s inefficiency and lack of coherence, he said, has prompted British Secretary of State for International Development Clare Short to routinely threaten that if the commission did not become more professional, Britain would manage its aid through bilateral negotiations or by dealing with other agents to broker the aid.

Observed Hewitt: “A real development policy is difficult to develop without a foreign policy, and I can’t see the EU having one any time soon.”

Meantime, in response to the announcement a few weeks ago that the Commission’s NGO liaison committee would be closed down, Pooley said that much of the tension between NGOs and the EC was the result of a breakdown in communication.

“Though the relationship was close, the committee began to treat NGOs as mere agencies like any other, and there was also a tendency from NGOs to treat the committee as a financier, with no dialogue between them about what they wanted to do in the long run and whether they even had the same objectives,” he noted.

“The relationship has become similar to that of a contractor and a client, with the commission asking, ‘Can you do this at a price we can afford?’ and the NGOs saying, ‘Just give us the money and we’ll get on with it’,” Pooley said

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