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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 03/03
Ownership and Conditionality
Laura Feliu and Rafael Grasa
March 2002
Abstract
Conditionally, ownership or empowerment, and partnership are terms and concepts that have long been used in the context of North-South relations, both in connection with co-operation and development aid and with trade, economic relations and even, although to a lesser extent, external relations. They are not always understood in the same sense; the notion of partnership has different meanings when applied to relations between groups of nations (e.g. in the case of the Euro-Mediterranean partnership) and when it is used to describe the links between unequal partners, particularly in connection with development aid and, in general, the processes aimed, in the context of North-South relations, at improving the relative position of southern countries in the international environment.
Therefore, in order to assess the pros and cons of applying the concept to the Euro-Mediterranean partnership, we must first analyse the notion, along with other concepts with which it shares meaning (such as conditionality). We will start, then, with conditionality and then move on to examine ownership at the theoretical and practical level (in the case of Africa). The subsequent sections (from Section IV on) will deal with the case of Europe.
