The UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have led to a prioritisation of interventions in third countries’ basic public services, such as aid for health care, education and sanitation. During their duration the coordination of European development cooperation had been declared as a key EU contribution to their achievement. As the MDGs expire, the EU has started to recast its approach to international development along the global lines of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This comes with a rethinking of development interventions, the role of international public finance, especially aid, and the goals of development. The provision of peace and stability, and responses to fragile statehood have increased in prominence. This is reflected in the EEAS’s take on development cooperation. For the EU’s common diplomatic service, this means reorienting aid to fragile states, security interventions and state-building, despite the EU’s modest means. At the same time, civil society organisations, but also the European Parliament, in line with the SDG’s claim on universality, are increasingly focusing on the development impact of ‘domestic’ EU policies, e.g. taxation. Whether practice will follow the declarations also depends on how the tensions between security integration and the coherence of ‘domestic’ policies for development will add to the hardly successful attempts at coordinating ‘traditional’ development interventions. This paper analyses how EU-level development actors grapple with the new paradigm to continue their work on coordinating European interventions for international development. The paper argues that, despite invoking to demands of the international community, the EU’s approach continues to be determined by institutional contention and member states’ containment.
