The financialisation of European Union development aid to Africa : promises, practices, and colonial continuities

Korte inhoud:This doctoral dissertation examines the financialisation of the European Union’s (EU) development aid to sub-Saharan Africa. While existing literature emphasises the growing role of financial instruments and private capital mobilisation in development finance globally, the specific ways in which the EU aligns with and shapes this financialisation remain underexplored. This dissertation asks: To what extent, and in what ways, is EU development finance to sub-Saharan Africa financialised? This question is tackled through five academic articles that together provide a cumulative and multi-layered answer. Article 1 provides a global overview of the Wall Street Consensus (WSC) ideology, analysing the constraints that multilateral development banks (MDBs) face in mobilising private capital. Article 2 investigates the EU-OACPS Samoa Agreement, illustrating how the EU’s financialisation agenda is embedded in its partnership frameworks. Article 3 maps the complex European Financial Architecture for Development (EFAD), revealing how strategic competition between the European Commission and the European Investment Bank (EIB) has institutionalised blended finance and guarantee instruments at the heart of EU support. Article 4 provides an in-depth account of the EIB’s operations in sub-Saharan Africa, characterising its role as a ‘constrained expansion.’ Finally, Article 5 advances a critique, demonstrating how the EU’s funding and financing sustains coloniality through racialised cultural tropes, bureaucratisation, and hierarchy. Together, the articles generate new insights into how financialisation interacts with geopolitical objectives and historical legacies of colonialism. Theoretically, the dissertation proposes a novel tripartite framework to capture financialisation as a multi-layered phenomenon, disaggregated into strategy, instruments, and practice. This enables a nuanced analysis of the contradictions between the EU’s financialised rhetoric and its operational realities. Article 1 theorises a trilemma of ‘maximising external financing for development’, showing the inherent trade-offs MDBs face in leveraging private finance. Article 4 advances the notion of ‘constrained expansion’ to theorise how institutional mandates, risk-averse cultures and intra-EU competition shape the reach of financialised strategies in sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, Article 5 offers a theorisation of the ‘coloniality of money’, outlining how Eurocentric epistemologies shape financing flows that reproduce hierarchies under the guise of ‘equal partnership’ and technical neutrality. Empirically, the dissertation offers an original and detailed mapping of the evolving EFAD and its implementation across multiple levels. Article 1 provides new evidence on how MDBs, under the WSC, fail to deliver on promises of large-scale private capital mobilisation, revealing a persistent gap between ideological commitment and actual mobilisation. Article 2 expands this empirical focus to the EU’s partnership frameworks, showing how the negotiation and finalisation of the EU-OACPS Samoa Agreement fundamentally reshape financial governance through the budgetisation of the European Development Fund. Article 3 traces the detailed institutional history of the EFAD. Article 4 maps the EIB’s constrained expansion in sub-Saharan Africa, providing an empirical analysis of lending patterns, sectoral allocations and institutional bottlenecks that limit the realisation of the EU’s financialised ambitions. Methodologically, the dissertation employs a mixed-methods design, combining qualitative document analysis of over 200 policy documents with 40+ elite interviews involving policymakers, MDB officials, and development finance experts. Quantitative analysis of financial flows, including EIB lending data covering 281 projects in sub-Saharan Africa and OECD datasets on private capital mobilisation, complements the qualitative insights. A reflexive positionality approach grounded in dependency theory and decoloniality underpins the analysis. The Introduction sets the stage by contextualising the financialisation of development within the broader transformation of global development finance, situating the EU as both a promoter and practitioner of the WSC, and presenting the conceptual and operational framework that structures the analysis. Each article builds upon this foundation by interrogating different facets of the EU’s financialisation trajectory. The study situates itself within critical debates on financialisation, EU development studies, and decolonial theory. In its Conclusions, the dissertation argues that while EU development policy exhibits strong financialisation at the levels of strategy and instruments, this is only partially and unevenly realised in practice. The findings reveal how risk aversion, institutional competition, policy contradictions and broader geopolitical dynamics constrain the scale of private capital mobilisation. Crucially, this partial financialisation does not displace older colonial logics but rather reproduces them. Ultimately, the dissertation calls for greater critical engagement with the geopolitics of development and the possibilities for decolonial alternatives.

Jaar van publicatie:2025

Toegankelijkheid:Embargoed