Evaluation of the EU institutions and Member States' mechanisms for promoting Policy Coherence for Development

It has long been known that the development of the countries of the South cannot just rely on the aid policies of the countries of the North but depends, first and foremost, on the countries themselves. There has however been little talk of the impact, albeit major, of the other public policies of the developed countries, involving much more substantial budgets than those channelled into aid, on the developing countries and the well-being of their peoples. Because this is such a complex and sensitive issue, awareness of the need to promote policy coherence for development (PCD) was slow to come about and it was only from the beginning of the 1990s that it became a discreet but stated aim of the international community. Policy coherence is included in the Millennium Development Goals adopted by United Nations in September 2000 as part of the new global partnership for development (goal 8) and the OECD DAC makes it into a new and clear-cut part of the “peer reviews” of its member countries’ development policies. An important step forward was however made by Europe with the Treaty of Maastricht, signed in 1992, which set coordination, complementarity and coherence, the “3Cs”, as guiding principles for European development policy, a competence shared between the Community and the Member States. Ten years onwards, it seemed natural to take stock of the way in which the 3Cs have been implemented. For this reason, the Heads of Evaluation for External Cooperation of the EU Member States and the European Commission decided, in 2004, to launch a series of six joint evaluations to study the way in which the principles of coordination, complementarity and coherence had been translated into practice, and with what impact. This study reports on the evaluation of intra-governmental mechanisms promoting policy coherence for development in the EU Member States and Institutions. The study drew on the findings of a preparatory scoping study, completed in 2004