02
Dec
Development and the India-EU Strategic Partnership: Missing incentives and divergent identities
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India has neither a strong inclination nor sufficient incentive to make international development a priority issue of its strategic partnership with the European Union (EU), whether in third countries or at global fora.
While some collaboration is taking place in specific locations and in response to concrete issues, it is unlikely that in the medium term the EU-India strategic partnership will significantly expand bilateral or trilateral development engagement.
Despite sharing some features with Brazil1 and China2 in this regard, there are a number of factors that make development cooperation even less tractable with India than with other rising powers.
Development within the EU-India strategic partnership
The EU-India strategic partnership was launched in 2004. Since then, a series of meetings including annual summits have been organised and agreements have been signed, including the 2005 and 2008 Joint Action Plans and other issue-specific collaborations. However, the partnership is widely considered to be underwhelming. Many see the action plans as ‘long on shared fundamentals and abstract political objectives but short on specifics and deliverables, and devoid of timelines’.3
In the case of India, it is suggested that while the strategic partnership has facilitated the widening and deepening of dialogue beyond trade and commerce, the two sides ‘have not been able to transform shared values into shared interests and shared priorities due to a big disconnect in world-views, mindsets and practical agendas, because the two are at different levels of socio-economic
development, come from two different geo-political milieus and have different geographical and geopolitical priorities’.4
Development cooperation featured heavily in the initial EU-India strategic partnership dialogue.5
First, the focus was placed on development within India, with the 2004 strategic partnership agreement proposing ‘development cooperation in order to enable India to achieve the Millennium Development Goals’.6
Attention then shifted towards greater recognition of India’s external role as a development partner. The 2008 Joint Action Plan includes commitments to ‘join efforts in international fora in using expertise in global development policy to promote the achievements of the Millennium Development Goals and aid effectiveness’ and to ‘conduct a dialogue on issues relevant to cooperation with third countries’.7
This change of direction reflects a wider transition from seeing India and other emerging powers as poor countries to acknowledging their role as donors/partners. The EU first attempted to engage China on development cooperation dialogue,8 but now it also sees partners like India and Brazil as potentially influential actors in global development. In 2003, India ejected all but its largest donors and paid off many of its outstanding international debts.9
While the EU was one of the donors that remained at that time, it officially ended bilateral development cooperation to India in 2014, although ongoing projects are still being completed.10
Access and download the full Fride – European Strategic Partnerships Observatory paper here: http://fride.org/download/PB14_Development_and_the_India_EU_Strategic_Partnership.pdf