The European Union and global development cooperation: Promoting minority rights?

Discussions around whether global development cooperation is adequate in tackling widespread global inequality and poverty have persisted since the inception of the idea itself. While policies stemming from development cooperation often focus on macroeconomic objectives in 'developing states', their impact on marginalized communities within countries is relatively understudied. The importance of this takes increases when the cooperation involves provision of project funding, and when the provider of such funding is the European Union, whose member States have benefitted from unrivalled wealth extraction from the countries they seek to serve through development funding. Rather than judging its utility, this chapter seeks to contribute three objectives: (i) providing insights into how development thinking impacts the overall EU agenda; (ii) offering a methodology for how this can be assessed against the goal of protecting minority rights beyond Europe; and (iii) analysing how principles translate to practice, drawing on the experiences of Minority Rights Group International - a civil society actor, in a bid to complement the other contributions in the volume.