Join Anissa Bougrea, Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, for a presentation of her work on the financialization and geopolicitization of EU aid to Africa under Global Gateway.
The author's paper aims to theorize the understudied, deep transformation of development aid, particularly the financialization and securitization of aid as the European Union (EU) navigates global geopolitical shifts, such as competition with China and Russia, and environmental security concerns translated in the drive for critical raw materials necessary for green transitions.
The EU has carried out an extensive reform of its Financial Architecture for Development, thereby turning to new financial instruments translated into the Global Gateway strategy, which is meant to rival the Chinese Belt & Road Initiative. These reforms reflect the emergence of a new global consensus on development policy, labelled the ‘Wall Street Consensus’, noting the increasing influence of private actors and shift from ‘loans’ to ‘investment’.
This paper examines to what extent both the resources and imbursement of EU aid are financialized by:
(1) proposing a theoretically informed and operationalized framework for studying the financialization of aid, and
(2) providing a comprehensive application onto EU aid by examining aid decisions in Europe in the period 2019-2024.
The methodology involves mixed methods and mostly qualitative analysis, although some quantitative data will also be examined. This encompassing approach aims to add to the (i) ongoing international discussions about the financialization of development aid, (ii) what we can learn from the EU to understand the securitisation of aid internationally (e.g., UN Development System, DFIs), and (iii) issues of justice such as ‘equal’ partnership vs coloniality in the EU-Global South relationship.
This contribution highlights the geopolitical stakes of financialised development and critically assesses its implications for Europe-Asia relations in an era of global reshuffle.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Anissa Bougrea is a Belgian-Moroccan postdoctoral researcher (Max Weber Fellow) at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy. She recently completed fieldwork at the Green Climate Fund in Songdo, South Korea, as part of a research project on the geopoliticisation of development finance, conducted in collaboration with Yonsei University's Institute of East and West Studies. She holds a PhD from Ghent University, where her dissertation examined the financialization of EU development policy in Africa, focusing on how financial instruments such as guarantees and private capital mobilisation increasingly drive European external action under the guise of equal partnership. Her research explores the geopoliticisation of aid through private finance, the interplay of development and security logics, and the coloniality embedded in North-South relations through development finance. Her work has been published in Competition & Change, the Journal of Economic Policy Reform, and European Foreign Affairs Review, and in edited volumes with Routledge and Oxford University Press.
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