Development cooperation struggles with a basic challenge. Although it is often justified with reference to goals that countries share, donors continue to privilege a variety of largely uncoordinated bilateral channels for implementation.

This inconsistency between articulated goals and implementation approaches can create a communications problem about what the purpose of development cooperation is and how to measure its success.

The German system exemplifies this gap, given the weight of bilateral implementation structures in its cooperation portfolio.

Although Germany is the third largest multilateral development cooperation provider in absolute terms, the multilateral share of its development financing lies below the average for OECD DAC donors. 

This blog post argues that as the country prepares for a governmental change in 2017, German political parties should commit to increasing Germany’s multilateral orientation in development cooperation.

This could be realized by increasing the consistency between cooperation goals and implementation approaches and encourage other countries to strengthen their support of the multilateral system.

The post is part of a series of contributions. 

The post is in German.

Erik Lundsgaarde er seniorforsker på Dansk institut for internationale studier, DIIS