DEVELOPMENT: EU Pledges New Link Between Emergency Relief, Development

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Brian Kenety

BRUSSELS, May 17 2001 (IPS) - A European Union (EU) commission put forth Wednesday a proposal it says is designed to better link emergency relief, rehabilitation and long-term development policy.

The measures represent “a step forward in developing a coherent and effective approach to linking relief, rehabilitation and development,” Poul Nielson, the EU commissioner for development and humanitarian aid, said in a statement. They are intended to guide the EU’s 15 member states’ contributions to assistance in post-crisis situations.

“Short-term relief mechanisms do not – and in some cases cannot – systematically take into account long-term development concerns, while in turn, development policy is not always prepared to cope with natural disasters, conflicts and other crises,” the EU executive said.

Circumstances vary, the EU commission acknowledged, but there are three broad types of situation where the linkage problem arises: natural disasters, violent conflicts and other cases where humanitarian aid is being used despite the absence of a general emergency.

“One of the real weaknesses, if we look back at the implementation and also (at) the character and quality of European Commission- managed aid ¡ since way back ¡ has been the lack of good coordination with what others are doing,” Nielson told reporters during a recent briefing ahead of this week’s Third United Nations Conference on Least-Developed Countries.

He said the “big push” now would be toward greater flexibility in how the EU funds United Nations projects, to allow the European bloc to move away from project-specific funding and toward supporting programmes.

Earlier this month, the commission issued a statement specifically on EU-UN relations. Nielson said it was designed to end the “war of accountants” that has been waged between the two institutions to the detriment of development efforts.

“The problem, that we still basically have, is the way in which we are allowed to fund UN organisations is to fund specific projects only ¡ and they also have to be reported, audited and so on, according to our rules, which makes us a very inadequate partner for a UN organisation,” he said. “It adds to the bureaucracy on their side.”

UN agencies have long complained that the lack of donor coordination forces them to pay inordinate attention to servicing those donors’ administrative needs at the expense of delivering services to their intended beneficiaries. To keep receiving money, UN agencies must prepare multiple project documents, budgets, and implementation reports.

Wednesday’s statement advocated more systematic approach involving “the largest number of international donors coordinating their own actions in a particular country. East Timor is one recent example. The Commission argues for a more pro-active approach to improving donor coordination, lack of which reduces the impact and effectiveness of external interventions.”

The commission statement added: “International and local NGOs (non- governmental organisations) and other civil society groups must also be encouraged to participate in coordination mechanisms.”

Measures are under consideration to readjust and streamline the European community’s own instruments, working methods and institutional mechanisms so they can be more flexible, act more rapidly, and ease the transition from emergency intervention to longer-term development efforts.

One benefit, officials said, would be that the EU’s humanitarian aid office would save money it otherwise would spend on longer- term efforts strictly beyond its emergency mandate. As a result, the office would have more money to fight other crises.

The ongoing reform of the EU’s aid apparatus also acknowledges that to be more effective, it must cede some decision-making authority to field-level delegations rather than try to orchestrate every move from headquarters.