The co-ordination of development co-operation in the European union’ in Hoebink P (ed), The Treaty of Maastricht and Europe’s Development Co-operation. Aksant Academic Publishers: Amsterdam. 2005.

Co-ordination is a much-debated topic in development co-operation. The paper begins with a brief introduction to the subject, and with a review of current initiatives (Section 2). It then tackles the history of thinking about co-ordination in the EUEuropean Union context, and summarises evaluation findings (Section 3). The report concludes (Section 4) that significant progress has been made in achieving better coordination, on both donor and recipient sides, and within the EUEuropean Union as well as internationally. However, turning the most ambitious aspirations into reality will require a great deal of bureaucratic drudgery, for example on budgetary procedures, contract conditions and reporting, and this will take time. Furthermore, there is work still to do to make sure that the incentives for collective action in this field are properly understood and instituted. By way of introduction, it is worth oserving that co-ordination, and its close cousins, co-operation and collective action, are topics much debated outside as well as inside the specific field of development co-operation. There are useful connections to make................. (see link in title for full article)