Interesting Times for Funding for Development

New Member States, now almost all members of CONCORD, still find little time/human resources to invest in participating in financial issues debates and policy work within the working group Funding for Development (FDR). CONCORD’s FDR working group had its regular meeting on the 19th and 20th of October 2010 in Brussels. Among the 37 participants, the big absents as in the last times were the representatives of New Member States (NMS) platforms, with only Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland being quite actively represented. While a clear need for more direct representation and voice from the absentee NMS representatives exists, this article is meant to provide a digest on the main discussions and relevant points.

The agenda’s main points included a number of issues that require input and shaping:

Structured Dialogue: The discussion on implementing mechanisms of development cooperation is now very much under way. The European Commission (EC) proposed a list of ‘needs’ that civil society is responding to. Among discussed topics are: re-granting of funds by national platforms, structural funds, pooled funding, service-delivery versus capacity building role of civil society organisations CSOs etc.

DARE Position Paper: A new, out-of-the-box proposal to create a new funding instrument, “Europe for development”, is an internal proposition to feed discussions for the Structured Dialogue, as the objective is to propose one global proposal on EC funding for CSOs. This proposal of the Development Education and Awareness Raising Forum (DARE) wants to overcome the North-South logic aiming to create a global civil society (involving citizens in the North and South).

NSA-LA Strategy 2011 – 2013: A session with Markus Pirchner, Head of sector ‘Non State Actors’ (Europe Aid F1) involved the discussion of the mid-term evaluation of the 2007-2010 strategy and perspectives for the following period (2010-2013). Among the key lessons learned Mr. Pirchner recalled the fact that the deconcentration was perceived as a positive process, the fact that the number of requests from Local Authorities finally started to increase and that the funds for ACP (African, Carribean, Pacific) countries were underutilized. For the period 2010 – 2013 it is previewed that the three main objectives will stay, that the multi-country actions will be reduced and that in the long-term CSOs are seen more in a capacity-building role. Also, there is a possibility that, due to the late approval of the Annual Action Plans (AAPs) the 2011 and 2012 budgets and calls will be merged.

Financial Perspectives (now Multi-annual Financial Framework): The discussions on the 2014-2020 Multi-annual Financial Framework – MFF (formerly known as Financial Perspectives) are beginning and CONCORD has created a MFF Taskforce to work on this topic in the coming years. In the end of November we expect an EC Consultation Paper on financing external Action post 2013, including European Development Fund (EDF), to come out and to be open for consultation within 8 weeks.

If you want more info on any of these issues, you can contact Elise Vanormelingen from the CONCORD Secretariat (Elise.VANORMELINGEN@concordeurope.org).

All that can be said is that there are interesting times for Funding for Development, and for New Member states we can count a few burning issues such as maintaining preferential funding, sharing lessons on how to deal with hard financial times (Old Member States platforms and networks are now wondering more and more about coping mechanisms), setting geographical priorities of development cooperation, defining the desired future funding mechanisms or being aware of the strengths and challenges of multi-actor development cooperation processes.

Information provided by Andra Tanase, TRIALOG