GPPi researchers win Brussels Forum Young Writers Award for essay on transatlantic cooperation in fragile states

GPPi’s Alexander Gaus and Wade Hoxtell have won the 2014 Brussels Forum Young Writers Award for their paper Connecting Security and Development: Towards a Transatlantic Strategy in Fragile States. The competition, run by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and with support from the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was designed to further cultivate dialogue among young leaders across the Atlantic and reward outstanding and original writing on the future of the transatlantic relationship. The award was presented by Didier Reynders, deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs of Belgium, at the Brussels Forum on 21 March 2014.

Gaus and Hoxtell argue that, despite having similar goals, the EU and the US distribute the vast majority of their foreign assistance in an uncoordinated manner, including and particularly in fragile states. This dramatically reduces both the potential benefits for the poor in these states and opportunities for greater regional and international stability. It also substantially reduces the value of every dollar and euro spent. For more successful transatlantic cooperation in fragile states, four conditions are necessary, say Gaus and Hoxtell:

• Political will on both sides of the Atlantic to promote collaboration.
• A shared understanding of the problems facing fragile states and a mutual interest in solving them.
• A strong platform for exchange between senior level administrators and working-level policy and technical staff in order to set priorities, discuss means of collaboration and provide momentum for moving forward.
• Action beyond strategic policy alignment to collaboration on the ground. This means finding complementarities, eliminating overlap and, where feasible and desirable, acting as one when providing foreign assistance.

While considerable progress has already been made in these areas, in particular through the 2011 re-launch of the High-Level Consultative Group on Development (“EU-US Development Dialogue”), Gaus and Hoxtell lay out four main steps for moving forward. 

First, foreign policy and development institutions often approach the issue of security and development from different angles, with their own priorities, approaches and even fundamentally different languages. Thus, there is a need to tackle differences in definition and approach as well as the lack of clarity on leadership roles – in particular on the issue of foreign assistance in fragile states.

Second, the transatlantic partners must find a better balance between short-term crisis response and longer-term approaches for supporting fragile states. This approach should also be reflected within meetings of the EU-US Development Dialogue.

Third, the EU and the US should undertake efforts to increase the transparency of the EU-US Development Dialogue in order to both alert civil society and expert communities regarding priorities of discussions and, ideally, also more systematically include their input into these discussions.

Finally, the EU and the US should work to better enable bottom-up participation of EU and US country offices and delegations in the design and leadership of joint programs instead of trying to prescribe programs solely from the top down.