Proposition 54K2645

Projet de loi portant modification du nom de la Coopération technique belge et définition des missions et du fonctionnement de Enabel, Agence belge de Développement.

General information ¶

Submitted by

MR Swedish coalition

Submission date

July 31, 2017

Official page

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Status

Adopted

Requirement

Simple

Subjects

development policy development aid

Voting ¶

Voted to adopt

CD&V Open Vld N-VA LDD MR

Voted to reject

PVDA | PTB

Abstained from voting

Groen Vooruit Ecolo LE PS | SP ∉ PP VB

Party dissidents ¶

• Olivier Maingain (MR) abstained from voting.

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Discussion ¶

Nov. 16, 2017 | Plenary session (Chamber of representatives)

Full source

I refer to the written report.

Mr. Minister, the present bill forms a preliminary crown on the reform work you have carried out in recent years in relation to development cooperation. It was an ambitious plan, because not only governmental but also non-governmental and humanitarian aid were subject to a thorough evaluation and prepared for the 21st century. Converting the BTC to Enabel fits into that broad enterprise. More flexibility was needed in order to focus on Africa and its fragile contexts. The OECD DAC also recommended greater decision-making autonomy in the field. We are pleased and support your reform, Mr. Minister.

However, my group would like to draw attention to a few points, first and foremost the position of Enabel. Enabel has a wide range of powers: from policy preparation to the ability to assign a contract to third parties, self-execution of projects, coordination and evaluation, the ability to participate in participations in companies and other organizations, a very broad spectrum in which Enabel has the exclusivity. In this regard, Enabel undertakes a performance commitment with strict conditions, but we are somewhat concerned that, if the conditions are not met, there are also no avoidance options to further fulfill the agreements with our partner countries. We expect this to be clearly included in the management contract.

Finally, we see a partial overlap between the tasks of BIO and Enabel. In terms of promoting sustainable and fair trade and entrepreneurship and the development of innovative financial instruments, Enabel is actually at a crossroads with the BIO. We hope that you can give more clarity about this too.

When Enabel acquires funds through the goal for proposals, we hope it is clear that those funds will not serve as a second subsidy channel in addition to the subsidies already received for project work. In this context, we would like to see a more open system of public procurement, on which fit-for-purpose actors can subscribe on an equal footing, rather than a kind of subcontracting through Enabel.

Mr. Minister, all the comments given do not affect the reform and your draft law. They are rather a sign to indicate that we do not believe that the story stops here. The operation will need to go even further and more work will need to be done to continue the reforms.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Minister, dear colleagues, behind a harmless title and a hybrid and ambiguous text, to take back the terms of the State Council, this is indeed a profound reform of the Belgian Technical Cooperation (CTB) of which we are talking tonight.

My group is skeptical about this bill, especially and above all for everything that it does not contain, for everything that it does not say. You may suffer from an acute obsession for investment and the private sector which, if we listen to you, should be the catalyst for the majority of our public development aid, despite the inconsistencies pointed out in particular in the annual report of CNCD-11.11.11 between this political orientation and the concentration of our aid in the poorest countries.

This bill has led to numerous debates and hearings within our Foreign Relations Committee. This work is welcome. We were able to have hearings and do serious work in commission. Today, however, it is important to note that many questions remain unresolved, both for us, MEPs, and for non-governmental cooperation actors, trade unions, CTB staff and field actors.

First, what about the staff? Too many questions arise both in terms of their number and status. It is not for nothing that the unions, in the common front, have given you a negative opinion on this reform.

Secondly, what about the essential principle of the delimitation of aid? We fear that a greater integration of the private sector and a form of merger with the diplomatic apparatus will lead to a link of development aid with targets that go beyond it and to a possible instrumentalization of development cooperation through policies that fall more within geostrategy or the defence of private interests than the well-being of local populations.

While I obviously have nothing against the private sector and its sustainable investments, there may still be some doubts about development cooperation. This will in any case require our full attention especially with regard to projects that are financed by BIO.

I come to a third element. Unfortunately, we have to be content with a wait and see – we’ll see! In particular, a management contract is expected to act here as a real monster of Loch Ness. It has been repeated several times in the bill. Nevertheless, no one has seen it yet and does not know what it contains.

I just hope that, when the potential impacts of such a reform are realized, there will always be a real Belgian Development Cooperation and, above all, that the expertise of your administration, which is to be welcomed, will not be evaporated. This expertise is extremely valuable as the challenges are large and the budget cuts in the matter are abyss.

The 2018 budget, which we will soon discuss, also includes further cuts. We are far from the target of 0.7% and, I am increasingly concerned, the consistency of policies for development.

For all these reasons, Mr. Minister, my group and myself will abstain from this bill.

It’s too late to talk about such an important project. However, I appreciate that everyone is there to talk about this, including Mr. Minister. I hope that you have all the attack that we know you, and that we have seen in commission, to defend your project. We support this project with conviction. This is an initiative that is fully incorporated in the government agreement as well as in the projects presented by the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Development Cooperation.

This project focuses on two branches: optimization and optimization. Optimization, as the reform under review will enable the future Enabel to respond to the new development paradigm that emerged in 2015. Optimization, as the reform also meets the central recommendation made by the Development Aid Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development during peer review in September 2015. The optimization of cooperation between the different actors of the Belgian development policy. Optimization through greater flexibility for interventions in concreto. Optimization, because Enabel now has a policy preparation mandate that this agency will then have to implement.

The optimization, Mr. Minister, thanks to the flexibility and autonomy to reallocate interventions in portfolios up to 15%. Optimization, thanks to stable financing, more advantageous than at present. An average operational budget of EUR 175 million per year, including an operational budget of EUR 23.6 million per year.

Our Minister said it in a committee, which reassured us following the various questions that I and my excellent colleagues, Mr. Miller and Flahaux, posed: we have received the commitment of the guarantee of funds for the next five years. The unions will be attentive and we will be; optimization because Enabel, dear colleagues, will finally have a legal regime for its staff. This is a security commitment, including for the staff. Then optimization by a system of legal continuity between the current CTB and the future Enabel.

Is this okay, Mr. Cheron? Do you want to say a word? If you wish, you can interrupt me.

Finally, optimization, Mr. President, between technical expertise and political orientation. Mr. Minister, it will be necessary to draft a management contract – we have long talked about it in the committee – drafting which we will pay full attention to in the coming months. It will regulate Enabel’s funding, the distribution of powers and mandates within embassies to clearly determine who is authorized to make political decisions in a way that excludes in final any arbitrary decision.

It will also regulate the specification of the rules relating to public service tasks, the rules relating to the tasks of third parties involved, those relating to the capacity of management, the obligation of results and the management of risks, the financial arrangements, the guidelines of the Staff Statute, the cooperation with the federal state, the business plan and several special provisions relating to internal audit and integrity.

I thank and take to the word Mr. Minister who, during our discussions, proposed to submit this management contract to the Committee on Foreign Relations. We are therefore looking forward to it firmly and will be very happy to be able to exchange about it when it has been concluded.

Dear colleagues, Enabel will therefore gain flexibility, be able to grant grants to local NGOs, retain its autonomy within positions abroad, be responsible for developing "country" strategies and portfolios and be responsible for preparing interventions. In the face of these advances, my group and I will support this bill.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Minister, from a need for flexibility and more centralization, and due to changing international paradigms, you found it necessary to reform the BTC to Enabel.

CD&V will approve this bill to reform the current BTC from a majority loyalty, although this was not included in the government agreement. We ourselves were not immediately demanding party to reform the BTC. However, we give the advantage of the doubt because the effect must ultimately occur in the management contract. This management contract should respect a number of principles, including safeguarding the autonomy and expertise of Enabel. In the current bill, this is not guaranteed, although it is important. You also confirmed that Enabel should be an autonomous agency with its own expertise in the field and with a clear functional boundary. It should not be a mere integration of Development Cooperation in Foreign Affairs, or an integration on the ground of Enabel in the embassies. I hope that the management contract will provide more clarity. We approve this bill, but therefore do not yet give a blanco cheque.

As Ms. Jadin said before, the further fulfillment and concretization has yet to happen. We would like to see the management contract discussed in the Foreign Affairs Committee. A review after a year of the various instruments arising from this draft law also seems appropriate to us.

CD&V is not opposed to a reform of development cooperation but we believe it is important that there is a sufficient balance between governmental cooperation, the private sector and civil society. We do not believe that governmental cooperation can be outspoken or instrumentalized for Foreign Affairs.

With these principles in mind and with a good outline in the management contract, we approve this bill.

It has been almost 20 years since a thorough reform of the Belgian Development Cooperation was carried out. The proposed bill was very welcome. The world has not stood still in those 20 years. There are new challenges, there are other solutions. The BTC could ⁇ use a facelift.

From now on, BTC will be called Enabel. We still need to get used to the new name, Mr. Minister, but the reform is more than welcome. It is not just a change of style.

This draft legislation reflects the policy choices you have already made and which you now want to legally anchor, with a greater role for the private sector, a more flexible approach and more room for evaluation. These are points that we appreciate, but unfortunately the bill also contains a number of uncertainties and unanswered questions. It is also not supported by the trade unions and the middle class. The three trade unions of BTC and DGD have issued a protocol of non-agreement due to the uncertainties in the law. They focused primarily on the status of staff members. According to you, Mr. Minister, these uncertainties, together with all other deficiencies in the law, will be resolved in the management contract. This is not a solution, but just a part of the problem.

We, like the civil society, also have questions about how the crucial distribution of responsibilities will be contained not in the law, but in the management contract, for example, how foreign policy and development policy will be aligned. There is no clear hierarchy between the two policy areas in the legislative text, while in practice there will inevitably arise substantial conflicts. The objectives of Foreign Affairs and Development Cooperation are not always the same. We must ensure that our development policy is not an extension of our foreign policy. The objectives and focus points of our development policy should be given as much attention as those of our foreign policy. This should have been regulated by law, Mr. Minister. By unambiguously emphasizing the new core objective of Development Cooperation in the proposed text, many concerns of civil society, staff and parliamentarians could have been removed.

Mr. Minister, this draft is a missed opportunity to fulfill a promise to the staff, the people who have been committed with heart and soul for years and days. It is also a missed opportunity to work with civil society to ensure that the core objective of development cooperation becomes more central to our foreign policy.

Therefore, our group will abstain in the vote on the bill.

Dear colleagues, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Minister, you will agree, the time is somewhat indecent, somewhat undue to hold a debate on the main cooperation agency of Belgium. However, we need to pay attention to how we organize them. This is how cooperation is often treated lately and I regret it.

For the rest, I will, of course, return to the arguments I have developed in the committee. The draft law has very good intentions. This instrument of cooperation should be modernized. Other colleagues recalled a whole series of elements. Your bill stops halfway. There is no complete and obvious clarification between the current three pillars of cooperation: DGD, Enabel and BIO. I have already made the comment.

Essentially, it is a cat in a bag because we refer to this management contract. You have agreed to come and present it to Parliament. We will see what it contains. I repeat, the intention is good. It had to be modernized. The mandate should be extended. It was necessary to make sure that projects can be managed more efficiently, but the intention and the project stops a little halfway.

For the rest, I consider, Mr. Speaker, that we should organize our debates in such a way that we can conduct in-depth discussions at hours that are more respectful of the importance of the subject.

Mr. Speaker, dear colleagues, the PTB is opposed to this bill, which is a sign of a disturbing evolution in development cooperation. This has been repeatedly stressed by many stakeholders in the sector.

Four critical points. First, there is the budgetary aspect. Despite the Minister’s promise to guarantee a stable budget for Enabel/CTB over the next five years, the PTB would like to remind that there is a overall and drastic reduction in the budgets dedicated to development aid. This decrease removes us from the target of 0.7% of GDP that Belgium has committed to devote. In 2014, the government decided to implement an austerity plan ranging from 150 million savings in 2015 to 270 million in 2019.

But, and this is my second point, there is also a paradigm change. Cooperation is no longer seen as an instrument of international solidarity to fight inequalities with partner countries and to promote the development of Southern countries. It risks being instrumentalized to serve, on the one hand, the current objectives of Foreign Affairs (including the control of migration) and, on the other hand, the interests of Belgian private companies.

This danger of instrumentalization was clearly pointed out during the hearing of Mr. Vanden Berghe and Zacharie, the secretaries-general of the 11.11.11-CNCD coupole, on October 4, last year.

Vandenberghe said: “Help must, in fact, remain tailored to the needs of partner countries rather than to meet the needs of European countries, as it now tends to be the case in the field of migration.”

This is not, as the Minister says, a modernization of cooperation in order to ⁇ the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, but rather a 40-year return that highlights Belgium’s neocolonial interests.

The third critical axis relates to another derivative of this bill, against which the PTB is firmly opposed. I want to talk about the point that now allows Enabel to grant subsidies to local NGOs in the Southern countries. The PTB denounces this mechanism of direct financing of the civil society of a third country by a bilateral cooperation agency.

For example, would you agree that the Russian state or the US state directly funds, through its parastatals, organisations of Belgian civil society?

Finally, we share the staff’s concerns, relayed by trade union representatives on the common front during their committee hearing. I quote them: “CTB and SPF staff are concerned, rightly, about their employment, job security and legal status, but are also skeptical about policy transparency, compliance with the rules of good governance and democratic control of Belgian development policy.”

Even if the minister promises stable funding and the maintenance of all staff, the unions fear that these promises will not be fulfilled, given the steady decline in staff over the past three years – as a reminder, the staff of the headquarters has increased from more or less 180 full-time equivalents to 150 – and the drastic reduction of Cooperation budgets. That is why we will oppose this bill!

Thank you for staying until this late hour to discuss this bill.

Let me start with what our colleague, Ms. Grovonius, said. You literally said it was “a profound reform.” I will not contradict you. It is, in fact, a fairly profound reform that adapts the CTB to a new development framework, that of the Sustainable Development Goals.

As Ms. Jadin said, this also responds to a request made by the OECD. It wanted a better articulation of the competences of the various development bodies and instruments. This process had already begun in 2014. I am very happy to be able to show it here.

Madame Jadin, in fact, this also offers a five-year financial stability for Enabel so that it can better plan its business.

I hear some say that there would be uncertainty about the legal status of the staff. I want to correct that. The staff at BTC has worked for 30 years without any form of legal status. So it has waited for 30 years and this government will finally give it a full legal status. The details of the legal position will be determined in a management contract. The content of that management contract is relatively similar to that of the management contracts with which one always works. So please do not criticize the fact that we will finally give clarity, while the staff has been working in total uncertainty for 30 years and none of my predecessors dared to advance this step.

Mrs. Van Hoof, an evaluation after one year is perfectly okay. You say that this reform is not included in the government agreement. As you know, this government has already done some things that are not included in the government agreement. One might say that the reforms we are carrying out, which are not included in the government agreement, are the more interesting reforms of this government period. Whether the reform of BTC is there, we will still see, but the fact that it is not in the government agreement is for me absolutely not a criterion to face it positively or negatively.

Mrs Bellens, the management contract will clearly more precisely specify the result commitment. I think the articulation between BIO and Enabel is relatively clear. Both have a role to play in improving the participation of the private sector, although that role is very different. BIO is specifically about investments, while Enabel is about using the private sector to strengthen certain projects, as a catalyst.

Mr. Dallemagne, I agree with you: the time of the discussion does not reflect the importance of the topic and, even less, that of the reform that we submit to you.

Mr. Van Hees, I recall from your speech that you consider it a bad idea the possibility now offered to finance NGOs that protect, for example, human rights in Burundi or the DRC. I’m pretty surprised to hear this, but ⁇ it’s due to your party’s absence during committee discussions.

I thank everyone for their support during the work and the discussions during the hearings and I hope that we can continue the reform of BTC to Enabel in practice from the beginning of 2018.