A4-0388/97

Resolution on improving the effectiveness of Community aid

The European Parliament,

- having regard to the report of the Committee on Development and Cooperation and the opinions of the Committee on Budgetary Control and the Committee on Research, Technological Development and Energy (A4-0388/97),

1. Calls for Community development aid to be focused in the future on a smaller number of sectoral or vertical framework programmes, selected on the basis of clearly-targeted subject areas; considers that efforts should not be dissipated on a wide variety of measures which are limited in scope and that projects should be better integrated into a sectoral approach and seen as support measures for the sectoral approach, rather than objectives in themselves; notes that, in its Green Paper, the Commission itself acknowledges that Community aid must be refocused in this way on sectoral policies and negotiated reforms in order to increase its effectiveness and its impact on economic and social conditions in the recipient countries;

2. Calls on the Community to improve its chances of success by refraining from embarking on projects without a clear understanding of what final purpose they are to serve, and therefore to carry out detailed feasibility and impact studies beforehand;

3. Notes that it is the clear responsibility of the Member States to resolve the significant problems - such as long delays in implementing budget lines and the failure to delegate to Commission officials in the ACP countries - which have resulted from the centralization of financing decisions within the Council's management committees;

4. Calls on the European Union to pay attention to the economic and social value, viability, appropriateness and pertinence of measures, with particular reference to the recommended techniques;

5. Notes that, unless Member States subject their own development cooperation programmes to comparable evaluations, it is unreasonable to judge the relative effectiveness of Community aid, and calls on Member States and the Commission to carry out comparable evaluations which enable all parties to judge and improve on their individual programmes;

6. Calls for respect to be shown for the logical reference framework at all stages: investigation, implementation, management, internal and external consistency, monitoring and viability, and effectiveness;

7. Notes that specific analyses of Community aid - for example, relating to food aid - have highlighted considerable success stories which should be built upon;

8. Calls for the coordination and concertation of bilateral aid and Community aid to be improved;

9. Notes the relative understaffing of DG VIII of the Commission compared to all development cooperation departments in the Member States;

10. Calls for the coordination of development cooperation and other Community policies having an impact on development to be improved; notes that the Commission itself acknowledges the need for better internal and external coordination, which would substantially increase the impact of many cooperation measures;

11. Notes the failure both to provide adequate human resources to implement the Council's Resolution of 20 December 1995 on integrating gender issues in European development cooperation and, more generally, to ensure that gender issues are fully integrated into the EU's development programmes and trading relationships;

12. Calls on the Commission to set up a central unit to assume overall control within the Commission of the evaluation of its development aid programmes, including the ECHO, Meda, Phare and Tacis programmes, ensure adequate quality control and comparability of the Commission's own evaluation results and improve exchanges of experience within the Commission but also with other development-aid organizations;

13. Calls for appropriate arrangements to be made to ensure that evaluation findings are fed back to the operational level, and for evaluation to start while large-scale, long-term projects are still in progress;

14. Calls on the Commission to ensure it has the necessary staff to process and administer the funding applications for cooperation projects submitted by NGOs, since this is a responsibility of the Commission and not of non-Community bodies;

15. Calls on the European Union to re-establish a sense of partnership by enlarging the circle of those who have a say in the matter beyond donors and beneficiary governments, by including the direct beneficiaries and the NGOs operating at local level; considers that partnership, or what is known as 'participatory development' , must go hand-in-hand with what the NGOs call 'capacity building' in the recipient countries and must enable genuine dialogue to take place on the utilization of resources;

16. Calls on the Commission to take gender issues into account in its cooperation programmes and projects, since the involvement of women is crucial to the success of development strategies;

17. Calls on the Commission to conduct an ongoing dialogue with the non- governmental organizations involved in Community cooperation activities;

18. Calls on the European Union to apply the principle of conditionality to aid, i.e. the democracy clause and respect for human rights as well as the achievement of minimum standards of efficiency and transparency in financial management, with a view to improving the institutional and political capacities of the recipient countries;

19. Calls for the EDF to be brought into the budget so as to enhance the Community dimension of development cooperation and aid;

20. Delivers a favourable opinion on the decision in principle, concerning development aid, to clearly separate the political decision-making process from the technical project management tasks and to centralize the latter in a joint service to manage Community aid to third countries; regards the creation of a joint service of this nature as an important step towards achieving greater efficiency and transparency in the management of projects funded by the Community; reserves the right, however, to state its views at a later stage on the manner in which this decision in principle is implemented;

21. Calls on the Commission to ensure that all measures to improve the effectiveness of Community aid are also applied to humanitarian aid activities of ECHO;

22. Considers that it might usefully establish its own analysis and evaluation capacity to gain a clear picture of the qualitative and eminently political aspects of Community development aid policy; considers that such an analysis capacity would not, of course, replace the technical evaluation structure already existing within the Commission, nor would it duplicate the instruments already in place but serve as a useful complement to them;

23. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Commission and Council.