Czechia: The Foreign Development Cooperation as a Policy without Politics

Abstract

This chapter maps and evaluates two decades of the Czech development policy with an emphasis on the period after the accession to the European Union.1 Before Czechia entered the OECD in 1995, it was the first of the European post-communist countries to restart its development cooperation programme (Czech Government, 1995).2 It was also the first of the ‘new’ EU Member States to be presented with an offer to join the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee in 2013 as a recognition of its compliance with its development cooperation standards. In terms of quantity of aid, the Czech ODA/GNI ratio has been surpassed only by that of Slovenia (OECD, 2014). In addition to that, Czechia is also the most successful country in applying for the funding for non-state actors from the European Commission and the USAID Emerging Donors Challenge Fund, two sources that are not reflected in the ODA volume (Badan & Sutrop, 2014; Eisen, 2012). Since there is no trustworthy comparative evaluation of the donors, this capability is also an appropriate indication of the formal quality of the Czech aid. It could be argued that among the other countries of the region, Czechia has been, in many respects, at the forefront of internationalization in the field of global development. Czech and other development actors often stress this point, by which they implicitly accept the assumption that a ranking of donors according to their level of ‘development’ can be established.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.