EU-CELAC flogs. Photo: European Union, some rights reserved.The last EU Summit with the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) was held in Brussels in June 2015. A new one, expected to take place in El Salvador in October 2017, has been postponed sine die – a a bad signal for the developing strategic partnership between the two world regions.
The two years that have passed since the summit in Brussels have not brought the manifold changes that the European policymakers anticipated. The new European Consensus on Development, approved in June this year, underlines the importance of innovative approaches in the Union’s relation with emerging actors, tailoring EU instruments to the needs of these advanced partners in order to contribute to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals agenda. In this context, triangular cooperation appears as the flagship solution.
It is a response to a new reality in which Latin American actors are relying more and more on South-South cooperation approaches, sharing best practices and implementing programmes on a horizontal cooperation basis – that is, applying solutions which have already been tested by actors with similar levels of development.
