European Union Water Diplomacy in the Spotlight: Did the EU’s Partnership Approach Help Work Towards the Sustainable Development Goals in China and India?

For more than 30 years the European Union (EU) relies on water diplomacy as a strategic component of its wider external governance. The central vehicle here is the EU Water Initiative (EUWI). Established in 2002 under the auspices of the European Commission, the EUWI is a partnership process that brings together EU institutions, member states and non-state actors with a view to coordinating their financial support policies for developing countries in the field of water. To this end, a network of regional partnerships – in Africa, the countries of the former Soviet Union, Latin America, and the Mediterranean – aims to connect European donors, experts and investors with policy makers and the business community in developing countries. The overall objective of the EUWI was to help countries in the Global South work towards the Millenium Development Goals and, since 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the EUWI changed direction between 2012 and 2016: While a few of the original regional partnerships were discontinued, notably Latin America and the Mediterranean, two new partnerships abandoned the regional approach and rely on bilateral interactions: the 2012 China-Europe Water Partnership and the 2016 India-EU Water Partnership. These two water partnerships and their attempts to work towards the SDGs lie at the heart of this paper. The change from a regional to a bilateral governance approach has at least three implications. First, it may enable a more targeted approach towards achieving the SDGs due to the consideration of national and subnational contexts rathern than of regional perspectives which may inappropriate for individual countries. Second, the political executive takes a more prominent role in bilateral diplomacy than in regional partnerships, potentially enhancing the role of national rather than regional or ‘global’ interests in the EUWI. This may work in favour or against the achievement of SDG milestones. Finally, the bilateral national approach reduces the potential influence of regional peer-pressure to work towards the SDGs as neighbouring countries are now out of the equation. On basis of two in-depth case studies – China and India – this paper analyses the EUWI’s bilateral partnership approach with a view to assessing itsr effectiveness in working towards the SDGs. We compare our findings to previous research analysing the four regional, multi-lateral partnerships established in the early 2000s, and also compare China and India directly, given that the early experiences in China were not all too promising and many European actors expressed hope that these mistakes could be avoided when setting up the India platform. Our evidence suggests that the two platforms have taken slightly different trajectories, but that notions of economic sustainability, i.e. economic growth, jobs, market access, take a prominent position, supported in different degrees by attempts to make progress when it comes to environmental and social SDGs. In other words, trade-offs between various SDGs are key, and the combination of European and national interests are as important as the funding structure and civil-societal support in target countries when it comes to working towards the SDGs in the field of water.