Assessing the Incorporation of Climate Change Adaptation in EU Development Efforts Towards Sub-Sahara Africa

Within international development cooperation, climate change has been acknowledged as an issue that should be integrated in aid activities. This also goes for the European Union (EU), which tries to live up to its reputation as a climate leader and leading ODA-donor by also emphasizing the need for integrating climate change adaptation into its aid policies. Despite an extensive amount of policy prescriptive literature on how donors should engage with climate adaptation in aid activities, the issue seems to get lost in translation, with very little empirical accounts of how this is being implemented. For the EU, the few reports that do exist have hinted at persistent problems in terms of expertise and policy attention. Yet, existing accounts are often shallow and outdated. Moreover, these reports also identify variations in integration efforts throughout different countries, but fail to provide a real explanation for this. In this paper, a comprehensive analytical framework is created based on four dimensions of integrating climate adaptation: procedural, discursive, organizational and budgetary. Based on this framework, this paper aims to provide a detailed empirical account of integration efforts by the EU in its development cooperation efforts towards Sub-Sahara Africa. By combining a document analysis of relevant EU documents with 10 qualitative interviews in 10 different EU delegations, we find that adaptation is only considered in more ‘obvious’ development sectors, in which the interlinkages with climate change are well established. In contrast, a truly cross-sectoral integration rationale is still undermined by climate change competing for policy attention.