Member State Influence in the Negotiations on the Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument (NDICI)

Summary

NDICI-Global Europe is the European Union’s framework for neighbourhood policy, development policy, and international cooperation. This new framework was agreed in June 2021 following three years of intense negotiations among the member states in the Council and between the EU institutions. The new framework presents a significant overhaul of the EU’s development architecture, integrating multiple programs into one instrument with a total budget of around €80 billion over theperiod 2021–2027.

The negotiations leading to the adoption of NDICI-Global Europe present a unique opportunity to gain insight into the dynamics shaping the orientation of EU development cooperation. To this end, the report examines three key themes:
• the positions taken by EU member states and institutions on the issues under negotiations, as well as the coalitions formed among actors
• the bargaining success of EU member states and institutions in these negotiations, overall and on specific issues
• the sources of influence that contributed to these patterns of bargaining success in the NDICI negotiations.

The report is based on unique data on the issues, positions, and outcomes of the NDICI negotiations. Through cooperation with the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs (MFA), the authors were given access to meeting documentation from all 99 meetings of the Council’s Ad Hoc Working Party on NDICI, where the negotiations took place. The MFA documentation provides a detailed summary of each meeting with indications of which member states advanced what positions on what issues. Using statistical analysis, the report subsequently estimates the success of all actors in reaching their preferred outcomes on the issues under negotiation. While the report covers all EU member states and key institutions, it devotes special attention to the role of Sweden in the negotiation of NDICI-Global Europe.