ABSTRACT
While different on several counts, since the end of the 1990s the EU and the World Bank’s missions have increasingly overlapped on numerous dimensions. This chapter first tracks the roots of two core mission and policy changes that have occurred in either organization. It examines the World Bank’s ‘poverty turn’, focusing on the shift from structural adjustment programs (SAPs) to the adoption of the Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF) and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) at the end of the 1990s. It then investigates the EU transition from Lomé to Cotonou, leading the launch of the EU ‘Brussels Consensus’ of 2006. The chapter contends that the consensus that both multilaterals currently share on the need to address development by tackling poverty and governance issues through a comprehensive approach has emerged out of the same material and ideational triggers. In turn, these triggers had been articulated among large OECD donors after the critical events surrounding the debt crisis of the 1980s. The World Bank started to filter critical ideational inputs from its stakeholders after the 1990s, introducing relevant changes in its approach to development promotion. The deepening of the EU–WB interaction, in turn, allowed inter-organizational relations between the two global governors to activate learning dynamics that would have a non-trivial impact on the evolution of the EU’s own approach to development assistance; this occurred in the new millennium through the launch of the EU Consensus on development of 2006. Change therefore took place inside both organizations, with respect to mission and policy goals.
