Offense is the Best Defense? The EU’s Past and Future Engagement in Promoting Effective Development Cooperation: Ideas for Busan

In March 2002, an International Conference on Financing for Development was organised by the United Nations in Monterrey, Mexico. The report adopted during this conference was dubbed the “Monterrey Consensus” and contains agreements reached in six major areas, most of which have driven policy debates on financing for development since then : (1) mobilising domestic financial resources for development; (2) mobilising international resources for development, including foreign direct investment and other private flows; (3) trade as an engine for development; (4) increasing international financial and technical cooperation for development; (5) external debt; and (6) systemic issues including enhancing the coherence and consistency of the international monetary, financial and trading systems. As a follow up to this UN conference, a high-level forum on harmonisation was held in Rome in 2003 to allow donors to discuss joint action to take forward commitments made in Monterrey in the area of harmonisation of development cooperation. A second high-level forum covering the wider subject of ‘aid effectiveness’ was subsequently held in Paris in 2005, and resulted in the ‘Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness’, which was signed by representatives from both the developed and the developing countries, and revolves around five well-known partnership commitments. Read Briefing Note 30: