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Description
Project seeks to address the lack of meaningful and informed engagements of the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) in EU-Africa relationships building, which is currently among the highest EU priorities. There is also a need for new participants to engage with African countries, colonial and traditional, without donor-recipient relations, who could contribute to changing the established dynamics and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Due to a lack of competences and experience of the Baltic states, neither the public authorities, the media nor academia can ensure a meaningful debate on this issue. Given the needs of our target audience - the Baltic policy makers - to deepen their knowledge and expertise in EU-Africa policy making and to clarify their own positions on EU-Africa relations, the solution proposed by our project is a public policy expert debate based on an analysis of Baltic experiences, attitudes and interests. With this project, we seek to encourage Baltic policymakers to deliberately engage in EU-Africa relations on the basis of the Sustainable Development Goals and the equal partnership principle. Seeking to ensure project sustainability and long-term impact, implementation of project activities will be methodologically oriented to stimulate active engagement of Baltic countries’ policy makers and will create conditions for the target group to refine possible strategic foreign policy initiatives, discuss their implementation and establish progress monitoring mechanism.
Civil society involvement in foreign policy making is more complex by its nature (while CSO capacities in this area are often dependent on government (non-)funding), but the lack of established principles and Baltics’ strategy for the African region offers a unique opportunity for CSOs to contribute to foreign policy making that would be based on the SDGs and equal partnership building.
Summary of project results
In 2020, the European Commission announced its ambition to renew the cooperation with Africa and emphasised collaboration in the fields of green transition, digital transformation, sustainable growth and jobs, peace and governance, migration and mobility. However, the world has significantly changed since then - Russia''s aggression against Ukraine on 24th February 2022 has added new angles and invoked new debates in the EU-Africa relations. The Baltics find themselves in an interesting position - even before the war there was in interest building partnerships with African counterparts but the UN votes on Russia’s aggression has actualized engagement with Africa even more. In the light of historical experience with Russian occupation and in-depth expertise in regional security, the Baltics are well-positioned to bring meaningful inputs to EU-Africa discussions on multiple implications of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, including transcontinental cooperation in security, migration, strategic communication, digital and green transformations.
In cooperation with the Baltic Ministries of Foreign Affairs, AfriKo, together with the University of Iceland''s Centre for the Study of Small States, implemented the Baltic-EU-Africa Trialogue Project 2021-2022 to activate the Baltic countries'' informed engagement in the EU-Africa partnership through analytical and inclusive policy debates. Informed and inclusive policy debate at national, Baltic and EU level was not an end in itself, but rather a way to develop concrete measures together with Baltic stakeholders.
Based on the primary analysis and discussions, we have prepared a final analysis with 6 recommendations that would enable the Baltic States to engage more actively in the development of EU-Africa partnerships.
Summary of bilateral results
At the beginning of the project there were some difficulties with the Icelandic partners, from whom we had to wait for a long time to hear about the next steps of the project, because the Icelanders were looking for the right person to work on our project, but the partners managed to find Erla Hlín Hjálmarsdóttir, who has both the academic and practical experience relevant for the project in the Icelandic MFA. As the Icelandic partners'' key role in the project is to provide methodological support to the AfriKo team during the research, Erla''s accumulated experience in the fields of small state studies and public policy analysis, as well as Erla''s hands-on experience in the Icelandic Ministry of Foreign Affairs, were of great value to the AfriKo team. The theories of small states and public policy analysis were directly applied to the analysis of the Baltic countries'' engagement in the EU-Africa policy context and to the expert panel discussions.Despite this productive collaboration at the beginning of the project, after assessing with the partners our experiences in organising the national debate in Lithuania and Estonia, we decided to amend the partnership agreement, where we reduced the role of the partners in engaging in the expert panel discussion, as involving the partners in these activities required more effort on both sides than it brought benefits, because AfriKo was better engaged in the context, while the partners were in a relatively small project size, and therefore were not able to devote enough attention to itHowever, AfriKo does not plan to continue the partnership , as the project was relatively small and not a priority for the Icelandic partners due to the EU-Africa theme, and the limited resources of both AfriKo and the partner made such a partnership an additional coordination challenge, while the format of a formal partnership made it difficult to flexibly deploy the expertise that would be best suited to the project needs.