Introduction: European Development Co-operation at the Beginning of a New Millennium

During recent years, the environments of international development co-operation have changed extensively. In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, development paradigms that had their heyday in the second part of the 1970s - related to the demands for a new international economic order and basic needs strategies - came under attack from the neo-liberal orthodoxy prescribing 'more market and less state'. Also the transformation of the international system in the late 1980s and early 1990s has affected development co-operation profoundly.