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European Centre for Development Policy Management Weekly Newsletter
20 June 2016
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Dear <<First name>>,
This week’s Editor’s Pick highlights an ECDPM Discussion Paper on Multi-stakeholder partnerships in the gold sector in Ghana.
Our Policy News items include an ECDPM Discussion Paper on cases of EU development and commercial instruments for matchmaking and a presentation on local content in the extractive sector by ECDPM’s Isabelle Ramdoo.
We also announce the publication of ECDPM’s annual report 2015: Making policies work for sustainable global solutions.
ECDPM IS HIRING! ECDPM and the Centre des études méditerranéennes et internationales (CEMI) are embarking on a 1-year collaboration and are looking for a dynamic young professional to join their team.
Read further for this and all the latest news on EU-African international cooperation.
All the best,
Melissa
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Editor's Pick
 Photo: Kadema gold mine. Courtesy: Madison Boratto – Flickr
Mining and community-based agribusiness for development: Multi-stakeholder partnerships in the gold sector in Ghana
Multi-stakeholder partnerships, particularly those that combine commercially driven private sector operations with a more socially-grounded community-based approach, are seen as a key means for achieving the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development. This ECDPM Discussion Paper examines Golden Star Resources, and its subsidiary company Golden Star Oil Palm Plantation, in Western Ghana an award-winning partnership that creatively aligns with the local context in rural Ghana, creating income and revenue in the communities outside the mining value chain. Agencies that wish to invest in such multi-stakeholder partnerships should consider the interests and drivers of all stakeholders. Independent facilitation of corporate social responsibility can maximise the sustainability and value added of innovation in multi-stakeholder partnerships.
Policy News
Photo: Cosmos City housing development. Courtesy: World Bank – Flickr.
Blurred lines: Cases of EU development and commercial instruments for matchmaking
This ECDPM Discussion Paper takes a closer look at three European private sector support programmes – EuroMed Invest, AL-INVEST in Latin America, and the Enterprise Europe Network – with a strong focus on matchmaking, two of which represent development cooperation and one of which has explicitly commercial objectives. The study aims to better understand their potential to serve development interests while trying to seek an answer to the following research question: what are the lessons to be learnt from development and commercial EU matchmaking instruments to engage business for development?
Photo courtesy of: Lindiwe Corporate Services.
Local content in the extractive sector: What opportunities in a challenging global environment?
ECDPM’s Isabelle Ramdoo presentation on local content in the extractive sector, to the recent West African mining and power conference, outlines the current context, opportunities, and critical gaps to be addressed. She stresses that partnership between governments and the private sector is key to ensure sustainable development. Local content partnerships (LCPs) require clear definition and objectives. Effective LCPs also require a holistic approach and should be well targeted, flexible and adaptive and need to assume politically difficult trade-offs.
Woman studying - Riccardo Lennart Niels Mayer iStock
ECDPM annual report 2015: Making policies work for sustainable global solutions
Achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development will require coherent governance approaches at all levels. To manage global challenges, countries need to work together. Negotiating common and competing interests and ensuring that adequate regulations are in place is immensely complex and can only happen through dialogue and joint action. ECDPM’s 2015 Annual Report shows how our way of working can contribute to making this reality. In 2015, we continued to inform European, African and international policies for sustainable solutions in areas such as governance, peace and security, migration, economic transformation and trade, and food security. Beyond policy research and analysis, we also acted as an independent advisor, brought people together, and actively collaborated with our partners to address implementation challenges.
ECDPM IS HIRING!
ECDPM and the Centre des études méditerranéennes et internationales (CEMI) are embarking on a 1-year collaboration and are looking for a dynamic young professional to join their team. The Young International Professional will be part of the Africa’s Change Dynamics Programme. The position is for a total period of 12 months. The candidate is expected to spend 6 months in Tunis, Tunisia and 6 months in Maastricht, The Netherlands. Deadline 1 July, 9.00 CET.
 Other News
- Although deeply critical of how the European Union has handled the refugee crisis, the economy and Russia, Europeans acknowledge the Brussels-based institution’s rising international prominence and want it to take a more active role in world affairs, according to the PEW Research Center’s “Europeans Face the World Divided”.
- Europeans have an increasingly positive attitude about the impact of migration on their countries and views aren’t necessarily affected by net migration, according to a study by the Centre for Social Investigation (CSI) at Oxford University.
- The Cape Town University Graduate School of Development Policy and Practice report on African Economic Integration unpacks the political economy of integration, deepens understanding of the forces favouring and opposing developmental integration, and develops clear strategies to drive the reform agenda forward.
- The latest United Nations Economic Commission for Africa’s country profiles provide assessments focusing on policy analysis, regional integration and economic transformation, and provide a tool for forecasting and risk analysis.
- Interviews with more than 40 EU politicians, diplomats and officials from countries across the EU — critics, supporters, and members of Jean Claude Juncker’s inner circle — as well as an analysis of his travel and meeting schedules, reveal a Commission President who is increasingly on the sidelines.
- A further $5,300 billion of investment is needed to stabilise the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere below dangerous levels, according to a study by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, an energy consultancy.
- The European Union’s plans to cooperate with Libya’s transitional government on migration policy is harming refugees, says Amnesty International.
- During the first quarter of 2016, 287 100 first time asylum seekers applied for international protection in the Member States of the European Union, down by 33% compared with the fourth quarter of 2015, according to EuroStat.
- Resilience – the capacity of different layers of society to withstand, to adapt to, and to recover quickly from stresses and shocks – has emerged as an answer to the growing complexity of the international security environment. In the EU context, the concept of resilience combines different policy areas: humanitarian aid, development assistance, disaster-risk reduction, climate-change adaptation, conflict prevention and peacebuilding. The aim of building societal resilience still needs to be translated into tangible, practicable measures, says the European Parliament.
- The IMF finds that trade agreements can generate substantial gains, on average an increase of exports by 80 percentage points over ten years. The export gains are higher when emerging markets have trade agreements with advanced markets. There is some evidence that trade agreements can potentially lead to slight import diversion, but not export diversion.
- The World Bank’s “Making global value chains (GVCs) work for development” argues that the participating in GVCs can help developing countries grow, advance, and create jobs, but governments must have the proper policies in place to engage with GVCs in a positive way.
- Eurodad has produced two briefings, one on Development Finance Institutions and public country by country reporting (CBCR), the other on DFIs and public disclosure of beneficial ownership. The briefings put forward general recommendations which aim to inform the debate on the role of DFIs in responsible taxation.
- A record 65 million men, women and children were forced from their homes by war and persecution last year, leaving one in every 112 people a refugee,internally displaced or seeking asylum at the end of 2015, according to UNHCR’s annual global trends study.
- The European Council on Foreign Relations argues that the new EU institutional environment provides less opportunity for the Dutch prime minister to shape policy outcomes by brokering between parties or by shaping political initiatives. The Netherlands, however, is the most influential of the affluent smaller member states.
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