The Diplomat
The Secretary of State for International Cooperation, Ángeles Moreno Bau, chaired last Thursday the first plenary session of 2021 of the Council for Development Cooperation, the consultative and participatory body of the General State Administration for the definition of international development cooperation policy.
The meeting was attended by the members of the four blocks that make up the Council: the General State Administration, Non-Governmental Development Organizations (NGDOs), social agents, institutions and private organizations -trade unions, business and social economy organizations, universities and associations for the defense of human rights- and experts.
On the agenda, as reported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the main cooperation perspectives for 2021 were analyzed, focusing on the regulatory, institutional and financial reform of the Spanish Cooperation system that is underway and on the peer review that the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee will carry out on Spain this year and by which donor countries periodically evaluate each other.
The Cooperation Council defended the integral transformation of the Spanish Cooperation system for its modernization, efficient management, rapid budget execution and processes adapted to the new multilateral order of Sustainable Development. As reported by the Government during the meeting, the draft of a new International Cooperation Law should reach the Spanish Parliament this year and the set of structural and legislative changes will be completed by 2023.
In this way, “the strengths and hallmarks of Spanish Cooperation, which are widely recognized, can be adapted to the current demands of efficiency”, said Moreno Bau, who assured that the pandemic also represents an opportunity and an incentive for the modernization of the system.
The plenary also valued the document of the 2021 Annual Communication that sets out the priorities for this year, as well as the 2019 monitoring report on Official Development Assistance (ODA) and other flows of contributions to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which for the first time have been published jointly. Despite the pandemic, Spain maintains the commitment to reach, by the end of this legislature, 0.5% of Gross National Income in ODA, which is the average in the European Union, according to the Ministry.
Proposals from the NGDOs
For their part, the NGDOs took advantage of the meeting to present their proposals for the new Spanish cooperation system, which were set out last January in a political document and in which they call for cooperation that is “feminist, ecological, committed to human rights, respectful of the planet, with sufficient and predictable funds and effective institutions”, according to the NGDO Coordinating Committee after the meeting.
In this sense, the proposals presented to Moreno Bau include, among other measures, the revision “in depth” of the instruments of financing and accountability of cooperation to “put them at the service of transparency, excellence and effectiveness” and the implementation of a model of cooperation that rests “on a solid, integrated and inclusive institutional architecture that allows its development from efficiency, excellence and coherence”.
The document also proposes the creation of a Ministry of International Cooperation, Sustainability, Promotion of Human Rights and Peace that “integrates, coordinates and leads the international action of our country”, the strengthening of the AECID “with its own legal status that allows it to be the pillar of a cooperation system” and the reinforcement of the Cooperation Council itself and of the spaces for dialogue, consultation and learning, so as to facilitate “the participation of civil society in consultation mechanisms and international forums”.
