EU — Outline for a Joint Caribbean-EU Partnership Strategy

The estab­lish­ment of a struc­tured frame­work for a broad­er and deep­er polit­i­cal dia­logue will be one impor­tant aspect of the process towards the for­mu­la­tion and imple­men­ta­tion of an enhanced polit­i­cal part­ner­ship strat­e­gy. In view of the ambi­tions of the enhanced part­ner­ship, the var­i­ous dia­logue lev­els must be ade­quate­ly flex­i­ble to allow part­ners to con­sult whether for­mal­ly or infor­mal­ly and to address issues of com­mon inter­est and mutu­al con­cern to the Caribbean and the EU, when­ev­er these arise.

An enhanced part­ner­ship also calls for a broad­ened and inten­si­fied dia­logue encom­pass­ing a larg­er num­ber of actors, includ­ing experts, senior offi­cials, par­lia­men­tar­i­ans, Min­is­ters and Heads of State and Gov­ern­ment, meet­ing at the high­est polit­i­cal lev­el, as well as non­state actors, region­al orga­ni­za­tions and oth­er stake­hold­ers, where appro­pri­ate, in order to ensure own­er­ship and aware­ness of the bi-region­al strategy.

This enhanced part­ner­ship should strive to bridge the devel­op­ment divide between the Caribbean and the EU through the pro­mo­tion of human and eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment, sus­tain­able eco­nom­ic diver­si­fi­ca­tion, pover­ty erad­i­ca­tion and region­al inte­gra­tion.. Fur­ther­more, the strat­e­gy should bet­ter syn­chro­nise the com­mon pri­or­i­ties and objec­tives and deter­mine appro­pri­ate instru­ments for their attainment. 

In that con­text, a joint Caribbean-EU Strat­e­gy should have some key fea­tures, includ­ing:
i. clear and mutu­al­ly owned goals and objec­tives, which are in pur­suance of the over­all objec­tives of the part­ner­ship;
ii. fun­da­men­tal inter­na­tion­al guid­ing prin­ci­ples drawn from the UN Char­ter; iii. an effec­tive imple­men­ta­tion and mon­i­tor­ing mech­a­nism based on coman­age­ment and mutu­al account­abil­i­ty, which builds on exist­ing struc­tures, while seek­ing to avoid exces­sive bureau­cra­cy;
iv. com­ple­men­tar­i­ty and coher­ence among the var­i­ous part­ner­ship frame­works: ACPEU, EU-LAC, Rio Group, Bilat­er­al and Mul­ti­lat­er­al Relations.