Jan Orbie

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Political Science

(Open) strategic autonomy (OSA) has quickly become the dominant concept in European Union (EU) trade policy strategy. This article aims to better understand how the concept plays out in policy practice by focusing on its discursive use in the rise and fall of the EU-China Comprehensive Investment Agreement (CAI). We start from the assumption that O...

That the European Union’s common commercial relations with ex-colonies and more broadly the ‘tiers monde’ now rest variously on benevolence, depoliticised practices, equal partnerships and values fuels reigning foundational myths about the EU in global politics. Efforts to disrupt these received presuppositions have come from interpretivist, postco...

The purpose of the conference was to bring stakeholders from academia, civil society and politics together to discuss analysis and visions on the future of trade and international economic cooperation. My presentation raises a number of questions, such as what happened to the window of opportunity to advocate trade justice in the context of covid-1...

Some may argue that they might be complementary in that decolonial approaches could ideally create more space for political debates within which decentring approaches could then advance pragmatic improvements and induce gradual evolutions towards systemic change. There is however no guarantee that this would happen, especially if decentring and pos...

Traditionally, the EU has presented itself as a normative trade actor, as opposed to other geopolitical trading powers. However, today, it is increasingly recognized that the EU is undergoing a geopolitical turn which also manifests itself in its trade policy. Yet, confusion remains regarding what a ‘geopolitical EU trade policy’ entails and how th...

After years of discussions, the European Union’s (EU’s) new development finance architecture finally came into being under the umbrella of the ‘Status Quo Plus’. This article aims to, firstly, bring much-needed clarification in the nebulous landscape of EU development finance; and secondly, gain a more profound understanding of recent changes by ex...

After years of discussions, the European Union's (EU) new development finance architecture finally came into being under the umbrella of the 'Status Quo Plus'. This article aims to, firstly, bring much-needed clarification in the nebulous landscape of EU development finance; and secondly, gain a more profound understanding of recent changes by exam...

The outbreak of COVID‐19 in March 2020 led to substantial upheaval in the EU's trade policy. Over the course of a year, EU Trade Policy as a field witnessed the launch of hitherto unthinkable ideas; the proliferation of a range of new buzzwords such as resilience, autonomy, and reshoring; and ultimately the arrival of a new consensus in the Trade P...

Pressures have grown on European policy-makers to ensure that geo-economic interests do not come at the cost of the environment and workers’ rights. In light of increased public salience of EU trade deals with third countries, this chapter explores how the EU satisfies sustainability demands in trade agreements and how geopolitical considerations i...

Trade policy is generally considered to be a key leverage in the pursuit of labor norms, environmental standards, and human rights. This is even more so for the European Union (EU), which exerts an extensive market power and exclusive competences in trade while lacking a full-fledged foreign policy. In recent years, there has been a growing demand...

This conclusion reflects on the contributions to this volume from a post-colonial perspective. Although the colonial origins of EU development policy and its continuing relevance are generally assumed, the implications of this are often underexposed. After presenting the “post-colonial challenge” for the study of EU development and international pa...

The European Commission’s new trade policy review promises more assertiveness and enforceability. While aligning with the ambition to become a geopolitical actor, it is unclear how this bodes for trade justice. Focusing on the Trade and Sustainable Development Chapters in EU free trade agreements, a number of critical questions can be raised on the...

The European Union's development policy has become increasingly intertwined with other policy fields, which erodes the objectives of this policy domain in their own right. We specifically look at the linkages with migration policy, which has been a highly politicized EU policy domain. This article assesses the EU migration–development discursive li...

In the past few years decision‐making processes and the normative underpinnings of EU external relations have become subject to intense debate in the European institutions, member states and the wider public. Previous research suggests that there is variation in the extent to which individual domains of EU external relations are politicized and con...

In response to growing contestation and politicisation of trade policy, policy makers have aimed to enhance the ‘inclusiveness’ of trade policy through the institutionalisation of deliberative forums in which civil society organisations participate. However, it is not clear whether these processes actually enhance inclusiveness. This article adds t...

Academic and policy interest in civil society participation in the European Union’s trade policy has been growing since the late 1990s. We analyse civil society’s engagement with the Domestic Advisory Groups (DAGs)—consultation mechanisms established by the European Commission at the implementation stage of its free trade agreements. While the Comm...

The European Union (EU) is widely recognized to be a major actor in international development cooperation. First, this chapter discusses key issues and debates on EU development policy. Secondly, the uniqueness of this policy domain, compared to other EU policies in this volume, is highlighted. Thirdly, the chapter elaborates two main policy-making...

Motivation There is a wide‐ranging consensus that co‐ordination in development policy is needed for aid effectiveness. However, our research reveals a number of surprising and significant gaps in existing scholarship. Development co‐ordination in Palestine has not been researched and the phenomenon of aid co‐ordination as ‘shielding’ against domest...

While policy and academic discourses point to important shifts in EU development policy, it remains difficult to ascertain the level of these changes. The main aim of this article is to propose a research agenda on change and continuity in EU development policy. Drawing on the literatures on paradigm change and post-development, this involves four...

In this reflection paper, Jan Orbie and Ferdi De Ville contribute their 5 cents to the debate on the impact of the corona crisis. They look at a specific policy domain, European Union (EU) trade policy, by engaging in ‘academic distancing’, namely through the lens of paradigm change theory. In doing so, they make an analytical distinction between t...

Het belang van de Europese Unie (EU)1 is in de loop van de voorbije decennia steeds groter geworden. De indruk ontstaat dus dat de EU stelselmatig aan macht wint en geleidelijk aan de functies van de nationale (lid)staten op het Europese continent aan het overnemen is. Toch kunnen we bij deze vaststelling twee kanttekeningen maken. Ten eerste, de E...

It is indisputable that China has been a major actor in climate change. This raises the question: of which lens is most appropriate to gain an understanding of the recent changes in China's domestic climate change policy? Although there is insufficient attention paid to political science accounts of central–local relations in climate governance, th...

Coordination has become the Holy Grail of European Union (EU) development policy towards Africa. Since the turn of the millennium, observers have referred to a ‘new season’ (Carbone, 2011: 157) or a ‘metamorphosis’ (Bué, 2010: 43) of European development policy, during which the EU has increasingly attempted to coordinate member states’ aims, appro...

Ontwikkelingshulp past niet in een progressieve agenda. Drie voorstellen voor een be‐ tere wereld zonder hulp en inmenging.

During the past decade, we have witnessed a transformation in the role played by China in international climate negotiations, which has provoked increasing academic and policy interest. While most of the current research focuses on normative or empirical analyses of policies, this article provides a comprehensive study of China’s climate strategic...

Recent years heralded a 'new season' of EU development policy, characterized by a remarkable number of initiatives to align EU member states' development policies. These evolutions have been widely described and analysed, though, much debate remains as to what extent the 2000s witnessed the emergence of a common European development policy. Therefo...

Since the 2000s, the proliferation of Global Health Initiatives such as the Global Fund have dramatically changed the field of global health. The European Union and several of its Member States have played an important role in the development of the Global Fund and have contributed considerable budgets to it. While the Fund has been successful in f...

There is a growing concern about the extent to which multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs), designed to improve social and environmental sustainability in global supply chains, give a meaningful voice to less powerful stakeholders. Trade unions are one particular civil society group whose participation in MSIs has received little scholarly attention...

Since the Lisbon Treaty (2009), promoting ‘free and fair trade’ has explicitly become one of the objectives of the European Union’s (EU) relations with the wider world (TEU art 3.5). In addition, the latest trade strategy of the EU, ‘Trade for All’ (2015), emphasises the need for a value-based trade policy. It refers to the promotion of sustainable...

Labour standards provisions within the Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapters of EU Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) are presented as a key element of the EU's commitment to a ‘value-based trade agenda’. But criticism of TSD chapters has led the European Commission to commit to improving their implementation and enforcement, creating a critic...

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of mainstreaming efforts regarding climate change adaptation (CCA) in EU development cooperation. By constructing and operationalising an analytical framework capable of tracing the level of mainstreaming throughout different phases of the policy cycle, we provide an answer to the question ‘what w...

This article focuses on the horizontal coherence between EU trade and foreign policy, from the perspective of EU trade instruments. Drawing from different strands of literature, it puts forward the argument that synergetic coherence between the trade and foreign policy spheres of the EU is not likely to be realised due to the constraining impact of...

Civil society has apparently been granted an important role in the monitoring of the sustainable development chapters in the new generation European Union (EU) trade agreements. While a debate about the role and functioning of these civil society mechanisms is emerging, we lack a profound comparative analysis of the treaty provisions establishing t...

In 2002 the European Union (EU) decided to gradually increase its official development assistance (ODA) towards the ‘0.7% norm’ by 2015. Both in terms of policy and in terms of procedures, this constituted a remarkable integrationist shift in EU development policy. However, it is unclear to what extent this integrationist shift (bottom-up) has effe...

The main purpose of this chapter is to map and evaluate European and international donor coordination on health assistance in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Examining four relatively successful and hitherto undocumented case studies within the health sector donor coordination group, the Groupe Interbailleurs Santé (GIBS), we want to make a...

Labour standards have become an almost routine feature of trade agreements. However, we have little knowledge about whether this linkage is effective; both in absolute terms but also in comparison to other instruments that promote labour standards on a global level. Such alternative instruments include public-private agreements, value chain managem...

Labour norms are increasingly considered in trade relations, but is the protection of labour standards a necessary condition for export to the EU? A Qualitative Comparative Analysis, based on countries that export pineapples to the EU, shows that labour standards protection matters in combination with distance, zero tariffs and institutional qualit...

While the inclusion of labour rights in European Union (EU) trade agreements has become an ‘unobjectionable norm’, analyses of their impact have been largely absent from the literature. This article aims to partly fill this gap in existing research by examining the impact of labour rights commitments in the EU–Peru–Colombia agreement, with particul...

The EU-facilitated dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina has been hailed as a major achieve- ment for the European Union’s (EU) foreign policy as well as for the ‘European future’ of Kosovo and Serbia, since it started in 2011. Looking at EU discourse – speeches, statements and press releases – this article problematizes the logic of the dialogue,...

In the last decade the EU has embarked on a series of deep and comprehensive Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Each of these agreements includes a chapter on trade and sustainable development, encompassing labour (and environmental) provisions. Against the background of increased liberalization and rising attention paid to sustainable development, EU F...

The European Union (EU) has always been a major actor in development policy. Paradoxically, however, literature on development policy within the discipline of EU studies is relatively limited in terms of quantity and relatively light in terms of theorizing. Perhaps this is because its complexities – as will be shown in this chapter – make it partic...

This document synthetises the main findings of three separate but interrelated studies commissioned by the Practitioners’ network for European development cooperation. Together, these studies aim to better understand the challenges and opportunities for European practitioners to coordinate in situations of crisis and fragility, allowing to formulat...

Background: This article assesses the global health policies of the European Union (EU) and those of its individual member states. So far EU and public health scholars have paid little heed to this, despite the large budgets involved in this area. While the European Commission has attempted to define the 'EU role in Global Health' in 2010, member...

This article provides a discursive account on the way the EU communicates the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina. Embarking with the concept of ‘recontextualization’ as used by Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999), we identify how is the EU, through discourse, representing the dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia and how it represents itself. We elaborat...

This study critically reflects on the involvement of civil society actors in the sustainable development chapters of recent EU trade agreements. It discusses how civil society mechanisms may legitimise the underlying neoliberal orientation of the agreements through co-optation of critical actors. Starting from a critical perspective and drawing on...

Existing studies of the European Union’s (EU) democratic governance promotion via transgovernmental cooperation in the EU’s neighbourhood seem to take the substance of what is being promoted by the EU for granted. In filling this gap, this article examines the substance of EU democratic governance promotion by assessing (1) to what extent norms of...

This article studies the impact of the European Union (EU) on the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). While literature thus far focused on the external challenges for the DAC’s role in international development, this study argues that the EU should be taken into account as wel...

This paper aims to assess the framing of adaptation in the development discourse of the European Union (EU). Theoretically, three frames (security, growth and justice/equity) are constructed. Overall, we find clear traces of the EU’s normative aspirations as a global actor. Instead of framing climate change as a national or global security thr...

Although the EU has shown a strong ambition to put a distinctive stamp on the international aid agenda over the past 15 years, it has also been pointed out that its policies suffer from a series of collective action problems. This article explores how both relate to one another. This article examines the EU's normative distinctiveness in contrast t...

In recent years policy coherence for development (PCD) has become a key principle in international development debates, and it is likely to become even more relevant in the discussions on the post-2015 sustainable development goals. This article addresses the rise of PCD on the Western donors’ aid agendas. Although the concept had already appeared...

This chapter aims to provide a concise overview of evolutions in European Union (EU) trade policy towards developing countries. In line with the general purpose of this volume, it also consid- ers the importance of Commissioner Cecilia Malmström’s Trade for All (2015) strategy in this regard.

The authors offer an analysis of the EU’s response to the transformation of the international trade regime that became radically clear at the 2003 Cancun Summit of the World Trade Organization, where emerging powers challenged an EU-US pre-agreement on agriculture. The failure of Cancun marked the end of a governance system dominated by Western pow...

Si la UE realmente está comprometida con la promoción de los derechos laborales a través de acuerdos comerciales, debería invertir más personas y recursos en este objetivo y mejorar su enfoque de la vinculación entre comercio y trabajo en tres aspectos: (i) la participación de la sociedad civil en la supervisión debería ser más sustancial; (ii) la...

In this short piece, we speculate about the possible outcomes of the negotiations on 'Trade and Sustainable Development' in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the European Union (EU) and the United States (US). We focus primarily on labour provisions . However, our conclusions to large extent also apply to environment...

How has EU trade policy responded to the protracted economic crisis starting in 2008? Unlike during the Great Depression of the 1930s, politicians have not resorted to protectionist measures to try to contain the downturn. The response has been just the opposite, with the dominant discourse arguing that in times of austerity and private deleveragin...

This volume offers new perspectives on the evolution of the trade-development nexus in the European Union against dramatic changes in the international context. Without disregarding them, it seeks to go beyond the controversial and extensively researched Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). In particular, it focuses on the reform of the Generali...

Without disregarding them, this volume seeks to go beyond the controversial and extensively researched Economic Partnership Agreements to offer new perspectives on the evolution of the trade-development nexus in the European Union against dramatic changes in the international context. In particular, it focuses on the reform of the Generalised Syste...

This article investigates the relationship between the European Union's withdrawal of trade benefits for developing countries under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) and its sanctions under the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Our expectation is that GSP withdrawals and CFSP sanctions will not cohere. However, our research revea...

This article: Problematizes the concept of ‘home’ and ‘hospitality’ in the case of unfinished states in terms of sovereignty. Argues that the concept of home is always preconditioned by the differences of host and guest; in cases where these two are intermingled/confused/unclear, the concept of home changes too. Looks at local and international nar...

n dit hoofdstuk betogen we dat de Europese ‘rolconceptie’ de voorbije vijftien jaar geëvolueerd is van een normatief model naar een geopolitiek realistische grootmacht. In het eerste deel wordt de discursieve evolutie meer uitgediept, met verwijzingen naar het politieke en academische discours. Vervolgens zoomen we dieper in op twee centrale domein...

A novelty in the new generation of European Union free trade agreements is the chapter on trade and sustainable development. This includes references to labour and environmental provisions that should be respected in the frame- work of the agreement as a whole. Civil society organisations have, appar- ently, been granted an important role in the fo...

n 2002 the European Union (EU) decided to gradually increase its official development assistance (ODA) towards the ‘0.7% norm’ by 2015. Both in terms of policy and in terms of procedures, this constituted a remarkable integrationist shift in EU development policy. However, it is unclear to what extent this integrationist shift (bottom-up) has effec...

Despite the growing academic interest in the development policy of the European Union (EU) and the booming literature on Europeanisation, the impact of Europe on national development policies has largely been overlooked. By exploring member state interactions with and through the EU level across a number of different issues, this study looks to her...

Recent decades have seen an expansion in EU-China relations. While this phenomenon has been examined extensively in the existing literature, bilateral interactions in the social field remain largely unexplained. This article investigates the evolution of the social dimension inEU-China relations and finds that social issues receive little attention...

In the last decade the EU has embarked on a series of deep and comprehensive Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Each of these agreements includes a chapter on trade and sustainable development, encompassing labour (and environmental) provisions. Against the background of increased liberalisation and rising attention paid to sustainable development, EU F...

The normative power Europe concept has greatly enriched the academic debate on what the EU is (should be), what it does (should do) and what impact it has (should have). However, various theoretical, methodological and empirical issues remain insufficiently addressed. This article will address two issues that have mostly been neglected: the perspec...

Surprisingly, labour provisions in EU bilateral trade agreements have widened and deepened over the past decade. One would have expected the opposite, given the coming to power of centre-right governments in the early 2000s and a stronger liberalization agenda since 2006. This article addresses this rather remarkable development. First of all it di...

This article analyses and compares the influence of the Hungarian, Polish and Lithuanian Presidencies of the Council of the European Union (taking place between 2011 and 2013) on the Union's policies towards the countries of the Eastern Partnership - Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The influence of the Presidencies is co...

The establishment of the United Nations Development Cooperation Forum (DCF) is widely regarded as a major challenge for the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. While many observers expect the DAC’s development role in international development to be diminishing to the benefit of the...