EU development cooperation with Africa : the Holy Grail of coordination

Coordination has become the Holy Grail of European Union (EU) development policy towards Africa. Since the turn of the millennium, observers have referred to a ‘new season’ (Carbone, 2011: 157) or a ‘metamorphosis’ (Bué, 2010: 43) of European development policy, during which the EU has increasingly attempted to coordinate member states’ aims, approaches and activities towards developing countries (Orbie, 2012). Although the EU’s ‘federalising’ role in development cooperation between the institutions and the member states has always been controversial (Carbone, 2007; Grilli, 1993; Holland and Doidge, 2012), the search for more and better coordination has become a key characteristic of EU-Africa relations since the early 2000s. This chapter aims to provide an overview, explanation and critical assessment of what we call the EU’s coordination fetish. In doing so, we refer to the major policy documents on EU development and discuss the state of the art of academic literature