Global Gateway and Global Europe: a new offer for an old bargain
After several postponements, the announcement finally came on 1 December 2021: Global Gateway would mobilise up to €300 billion in investment worldwide by 2027, centred on infrastructure and connectivity. The EU was promising more than projects. It was unveiling a geopolitical partnership offer with the ambition to change how Europe engaged with the Global South.
Development cooperation would help finance that offer, but would no longer define its limits. Global Gateway brought investment, trade and European strategic interests into the same frame as partners’ development priorities. By bringing EU institutions and instruments together, Europe hoped to make a more coherent offer: a mutually beneficial partnership.
This piece asks whether Global Gateway, and the proposed Global Europe Instrument that would support it, can reconcile development and partnership under unequal power. It first traces how European priorities gave rise to the two initiatives, then examines the dynamics shaping the partnership offer, and finally considers what kind of relationship that offer makes possible.
Global Gateway to emerging European priorities
Global Gateway and Global Europe grew out of two decades in which the EU increasingly asked development policy to respond to pressures beyond development. The financial and euro crises tightened public budgets, and the 2011 Agenda for Change put greater emphasis on growth and private investment as ways to extend the reach of public finance. From 2015, displacement towards Europe increased domestic pressure to link development spending to migration cooperation. Climate commitments after the Paris Agreement and energy priorities also called for closer coordination with development policy. The 2017 European Consensus placed these concerns within a broader account of development as part of the EU’s response to global challenges; NDICI–Global Europe then consolidated previously separate financing instruments. Each reform had its own rationale. Together, the search for coherence through “nexuses” made development policy a place where the EU could pursue objectives originating elsewhere.
Global Gateway gave those reforms a geopolitical narrative and a strategy. China’s Belt and Road Initiative had challenged the donor–recipient model with an offer centred on infrastructure and investment, described in terms of mutual benefit. The EU explicitly presented Global Gateway as a values-based alternative. Drawing on its growing investment capacity and its climate and digital priorities, it recast development cooperation as part of a wider partnership offer. A shift in EU language already under way—from poverty reduction towards mutually beneficial partnerships, from development cooperation towards partnership—gave that offer a rationale beyond aid. In this respect, Global Gateway reclaims Pearson’s lesson that development outcomes depend on the “whole economic relationship”. But the strategy brought that relationship together chiefly around Europe’s need for a stronger external offer. The risk is that development lends legitimacy to its investment and trade priorities without gaining the power to align their terms with development.
In the Commission’s vision, the proposed Global Europe Instrument would turn this evolution into architecture. Priorities once linked to development through successive nexuses would become objectives of the regulation in their own right. Development would remain, but would no longer organise the instrument’s purpose: its budget and legal basis would also support a wider economic and geopolitical offer. The weakening of development-specific objectives and safeguards marks the shift from a development-cooperation instrument towards a wider external-policy instrument—one that no longer even claims development in its name. The Commission’s initial proposal to allow the 90 per cent ODA spending target to be amended by delegated act makes the institutional choice unusually stark. Without changing the regulation’s objectives or provisions, the Commission could have lowered the development-spending threshold and shifted the instrument’s centre of gravity towards a more explicit foreign-policy role. The same legal framework could serve a different political purpose. The Commission proposed a hybrid that draws on development’s Treaty mandate, international commitments and financial resources to build a broader EU foreign-policy capacity, without establishing how partner development priorities would govern the choices between competing European objectives.
Global Europe: the impossible compromise
The problem with this hybrid lies beyond the balance of objectives written into the regulation. Deeper institutional and operational changes point towards an instrument increasingly weakened in its development purpose. One is the changing direction of coherence: it is turning inward. Policy coherence for development asked whether EU policies undermined development in partner countries. Under the new partnership offer, coherence increasingly asks whether the EU’s institutions and instruments are aligned to advance its own priorities. The Investment Hub, Team Europe and Team Nationals seek to coordinate European actors more closely, particularly development banks, export-finance actors and private companies. That responds to a real need for better coordination, which can improve development effectiveness. But the debate over bringing export-credit agencies into Global Europe shows what this approach leaves unresolved: their home-content requirements can conflict with local value creation in partner countries. The EU is sharpening its capacity to deliver a common offer without making that offer answerable to development. Policy coherence risks becoming less a means of building mutually beneficial partnerships than a way to project European interests more effectively.
Financialisation, now fully mainstreamed in the GEI’s proposed toolbox, points to the same shift at the operational level. Development challenges are turned into investment opportunities structured around guarantees, blending, bankable projects and investor risk, linking financial institutions, intermediaries and companies more closely to development budgets. Yet the development additionality of EU blended-finance operations is often assumed rather than demonstrated in accountability reporting. Financial additionality—the claim that blending crowds in private capital for projects that would not otherwise proceed—has also been difficult to establish from the EU’s own evidence. Without evidence that these investments deliver additional development benefits, development risks becoming less the purpose of the funding than the justification for using it to support commercial projects. Further mainstreaming these tools in the GEI draws development finance closer to European commercial interests before demonstrating that this delivers additional development outcomes.
GEI negotiations are ongoing and may well strengthen development provisions. But the deeper choice cannot be settled by preserving safeguards alongside an increasingly broad mandate. One possible compromise leaves the GEI anchored in development on paper, while wider partnership priorities continue to shape its use—as Global Gateway’s implementation through the more firmly development-anchored NDICI–Global Europe already illustrates. Another allows development’s mandate and budget to give way progressively to a more explicit soft foreign-policy instrument, particularly if the ODA share is lowered in the future. The two paths differ in degree, but both retain the historical tension: development finance supports real needs while lending legitimacy to a partnership whose wider terms can work against them. The likely compromise may therefore preserve development within Global Europe without giving it the authority to shape the offer as a whole. Global Europe does not invent the contradiction; it risks making it more durable through a common narrative, financial toolbox and legal architecture.
Domestic needs do not make a partnership offer
This is where a more coordinated EU offer can become a weaker partnership offer. Europe has legitimate interests in trade, energy security and geopolitical influence. A wider partnership could pursue them while making their terms compatible with development. But the instrument emerging from Europe’s competing priorities asks development policy to carry that wider agenda without giving development greater force over it. The result is not a settled strategy for building partnerships with countries whose priorities and bargaining power differ from Europe’s. It is a series of trade-offs that the EU has placed inside one framework, weakening both the development offer and the external strategy it hopes to build.
The first contradiction is legitimacy. When European interests are presented as development policy and automatically called “mutual”, they generate suspicion rather than trust. Partners can see the gap between Europe’s partnership language and the power it retains to set the terms. Global Gateway makes that gap concrete. Partner states have repeatedly criticised the lack of systematic consultation: projects are designed in Brussels, and partners are brought in before launch rather than involved in shaping them from the start. Instead of confronting trade-offs, the EU conceals them behind development language. That weakens the legitimacy of its own interests—and its political capital at a time when shifts in global power give partners more alternatives.
The second contradiction is financial. Greater geopolitical ambition requires proportionate resources. A common export-credit capacity or stronger support for European companies abroad may be legitimate and overdue, but should be funded distinctly and additionally. Using ODA to de-risk commercial projects asks private actors and development finance institutions to pursue outcomes with different risk profiles and political purposes. Companies are asked to fulfil development commitments; development practitioners are asked to make their interventions bankable. The result can be big promises, slow preparation and delivery, and a widening gap between the scale announced under Global Gateway and the investments that reach the ground. An overstretched development toolbox is a poor substitute for a properly resourced economic-diplomacy one.
The third contradiction is institutional. The EU speaks of assertiveness while weakening the actors best placed to understand partner politics and forge partnerships. Delegations face pressure on staffing and expertise; development practitioners have less influence over a project pipeline increasingly shaped by financial institutions and companies. Civil society organisations and local authorities are consulted, but too often only as a tick-box exercise. Financial institutions and companies can assess risk and deliver investments, but their mandate is not to negotiate the political terms of cooperation or represent the EU’s relationship with partner societies. The EU may become better at assembling projects while losing the capacity for the dialogue and co-ownership that would make them part of a durable partnership.
The result is a weaker Global Europe offer, not a stronger one. By using development policy to pursue objectives that require different mandates and instruments, the EU risks weakening both its development commitments and its wider external action.
A new gateway to old mistakes
Global Gateway could have been the moment when the EU drew the right lesson from development policy’s history: aid alone cannot build development, and partnership must be judged across the whole economic relationship. Europe’s interests in energy security, trade and influence are legitimate. Investment and trade can also be essential to development—but European interests do not become development outcomes simply by being brought under the same offer.
The risk is that Global Gateway and Global Europe use development finance, legitimacy and institutions to organise European priorities more effectively, while giving partners too little influence over the terms. That would weaken more than development policy. It would make the EU’s wider offer less credible at a time when countries have more choices—and less reason to accept a partnership they cannot meaningfully shape.
The next piece turns to the other side of the relationship. It asks what partnership looks like from the perspective of the countries and societies the EU calls its partners—and which priorities must shape the bargain if mutual benefit is to mean more than a European claim.
