Many thanks for your blog.

You raise a lot of interesting issues, but I can only comment really in my personal capacity on the substance of the ERD 2011/2012 (I was the team leader) – the first ERD that a consortium of ODI, ECDPM and DIE was leading (not including the ERD that Simon mentioned), and which indeed received a number of useful inputs and presentations including two by Oxfam in London and Brussels which motivated us further in selecting a chapter in the ERD on land.

The ERD 2011/2012 will be launched in May 2012. The report is called Confronting scarcity: managing water, energy and land for inclusive and sustainable growth. You can read about some emerging findings presented at the recent World Water in my blog http://www.odi.org.uk/opinion/details.asp?id=6382&title=g20-rio20-european-report-development-2012-managin-resources and in the blog by Imme Scholz and Ines Dombrowsky (from DIE), core ERD team member resp. lead author of the water chapter (http://www.erd-blog.eu/blog/world-water-forum-2012-well-defined-rights-are-key-allocating-water-across-uses-and-sectors ).

The final chapter of the report (implications for EU policy) deals inter alia with issues you think are important (so hold your breath): the need to improve Europe’s own developmental/environmental impact, it discusses biofuel policies from a WEL (water-energy-land) nexus perspective, and highlights correct pricing and abolishing the range of distortionary subsidies (from ODI’s previous and current work we learn about the economic damage of CAP subsidies, but I had not realised until I embarked on this ERD, the considerable extent to which environmental experts are vehemently opposed to the use of resource wasting subsidies, outpacing development specialists on this it seems).

On the Common Agricultural Policy: don’t give up especially now, because of the need to influence the decisions on CAP reform when it matters most – which include 2012, as the multi annual spending limits are being discussed. There are a whole range of policies where spending could usefully help achieve food security (a stated goal of CAP) world-wide as opposed to European farmer security alone.

On political economy: we use a lot of case study material and also try to tease out a number of political economy aspects helpful in explaining achieving results(or failures), such as leadership, capacity, interministerial / intersectoral co-ordination.

Your discussion on what makes the ERD “European” is interesting – having spent several years of education (starting in the 1980s in the Netherlands, stuck between the German and UK forms of capitalism) on different forms of capitalism (and several have been added in Europe since), it is not easy to capture all the European aspects in a few buzz words. Having said that, the current report is on inclusiveness and sustainability, terms that are firmly embedded in the European Treaty. By the way, one of the commentators at the Bonn nexus conference felt the EU/report was too European focused , rather than it being too little European focused. The ERD has implications for EU (development) policy, which in my eyes is an important element of it being a European report. One could indeed suggest that the EU could build on its leadership role at Durban and extend to other environmental areas as Toby suggests. Europe does have much to offer, and we all need to engage with the best of research and action to get the best out of Europe.

Regards

Dirk Willem te Velde

Sorry you missed the first of the ERDs, on the MDGs, led by Francois Bourguignon, to which I contributed. See http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/MDG_2015_Publications/Bourguignon_et_al__PAPER.pdf

On the question of what Europe has to contribute to development policy, I do hope you will connect with the work of our ODI project on European development cooperation (see http://www.international-development.eu) and also with the output of the European Think Tanks Group, which has been thinking about your question for some years. See, for example, our publication ‘New Challenges, New Beginnings’, published in 2010, which explicitly discussed EU comparative advantage (http://www.odi.org.uk/resources/details.asp?id=4735&title=new-challenges-new-beginnings-next-steps-european-development-cooperation).