ABSTRACT
Beyond Market Access for Economic Development: EU-Africa Relations in Transition Gerrit Faber & Jan Orbie (eds) London: Routledge, 2009
Trade, Poverty and the Environment: The EU, Cotonou and the AfricanCaribbean-Pacific Bloc Adrian Flint Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
In Search of Structural Power: EU Aid Policy as a Global Political Instrument Patrick Holden Farnham: Ashgate, 2009
EU Development Policy in a Changing World: Challenges for the 21st Century Andrew Mold (ed) Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007
EU development policy appears to have gone through substantial change during recent years.1 In line with a wider reconsideration of the ‘Washington Consensus’ during the late 1990s, the EU declared it was to follow the approach of other multilateral actors and focus on poverty reduction as the main objective of its development policy.2 This was followed in December
2005 with agreement on the ‘European Consensus on Development’, which sought to set out a common vision for the development policy of both the EU and the individual member states.3 The Post-Washington Consensus concerns of poverty reduction, democracy and good governance, and developing country ownership were reaffirmed in this document. In this review, with reference to the five books under consideration, I outline some of the key issues that are pertinent when we consider how to understand these developments The edited book by Mold provides a critical overview of the increasingly
complex interactions between the EU and developing countries. The diverse chapters in EU Development Policy in a Changing World: Challenges for the 21st Century focus in the main on the impacts of the enlargement of the EU on development policy. The book then goes on to analyse specific developments related to the various different regions that the EU engages with. Read as a whole, this broadly critical book highlights how both internal and external pressures make it difficult for the EU to achieve the kind of effective and coherent approach outlined in the European Consensus of 2005. In his concluding chapter Mold suggests that perhaps the goal of coherence is an impossible dream. He says that ‘it is useless, for instance, to constantly exhort policy co-ordination and coherence in aid delivery if structural constraints and bureaucratic procedures do not allow this to take place’.4
