Global Europe

After a successful first year, Friends of Europe’s Global Europe programme will continue to explore what Europe can learn from its partners as well as the opportunities, challenges and impacts of mutually beneficial partnerships between different regions and actors. The aim is to reshape Europe’s role in the world and to find ways to enable cooperation in addressing the most pressing issues and disruptive trends of our time – first and foremost climate change and digitalisation. In the current geopolitical and polycrisis context, it is important not to lose sight of these important global trends that affect us all. In the face of these challenges, collaboration and a unified effort are paramount for driving positive change on a global scale.

Resulting from the programme’s launch event in 2023 – Global Europe: bridging investment and sustainable development – the newly established DRIVE Impact initiative will be a platform and catalyst for funders, investors, delivery and implementation bodies, private sector, regional and local governance and civil society organisations to expand and deepen the global and European conversation on sustainable and inclusive development. It will encourage fresh thinking on issues and mechanisms such as the European Global Gateway, how to craft community and social dividends for funding programme policy and evaluation criteria, the role of SDGs for partner agreements, the engagement of the (local) private sector, the upscaling of existing projects and solutions and, above all, the question of shared priorities and truly equal partnerships.

A key aspect of the DRIVE Impact initiative thereby revolves around the strategic role of the SDGs in partnership agreements, focussing on how the SDGs can act as unifying markers that set the direction of collaborations and agreements. In addition, specific attention will be given to the active engagement of the local private sector, which brings local know-how and innovation into the development equation.

Regionally, the 2024 Global Europe programme will focus on East and Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Arctic. In close cooperation with the Friends of Europe teams for Digital & Data Governance; Climate, Energy & Natural Resources; and Peace, Security & Defence, Europe’s relations with these other regions will be explored from different angles. The focus thereby will always be on how and at which levels cooperation is needed, mutually beneficial and how it can be enhanced and streamlined for more effective outcomes.

The Global Europe programme will, more than any other programme at Friends of Europe, bring together a large diversity of actors, from both the public and private sectors – European as well as non-European. The newly created network for the DRIVE Impact initiative, consisting of EU policymakers, EU and non-EU government representatives, EU and non-EU private sector representatives (including SMEs in project regions), development agencies, NGOs, international organisations and academics, will come together in regular working group meetings throughout the year. Divided into the for sub-groups – re-balancing global perspectives to social change; community and social dividends for a social transition; Global supply chains: food security; and trade and investment – the outcomes produced by this network will feed into all of the other activities of the Global Europe programme.

The summit at the end of the year will be used to reflect on the results of all activities and the progress made since then, especially at the EU level.