1. PREFACE

Poverty reduction, peace and security, sustainable development and a stable climate are challenges which, in a globalised era, cannot be provided by individual countries alone – and certainly not in the poorest part of the world. Therefore, it is more necessary than ever to establish mutually binding partnerships and international development cooperation.

At the same time, we face a multilateral architecture of development cooperation, which is not sufficiently up-to-date. There is a need for reforming and restructuring the multilateral system to ensure development for the benefit of the world’s poor, to create sustainable economic growth and to find international, binding solutions to new global challenges.

In the autumn of 2007, the Danish Government initiated a review of the Danish multilateral development cooperation with the aim to further promote the quality and efficiency in and of the multilateral development assistance. The result is here presented in the form of new principles for Denmark’s multilateral development engagement, showing how Denmark in the coming years will live up to its global responsibilities within the international development cooperation.

Poverty reduction is the overriding objective for Danish multilateral development assistance as well as for the bilateral development assistance. It is our partner countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America that can best judge whether the multilateral assistance makes the necessary difference. It is absolutely crucial that development assistance is based on the partner countries’ own strategies, systems and programmes in accordance with the Paris Declaration on increased effectiveness of development assistance. Denmark will work to ensure that the poorest developing countries get the opportunity to exercise influence in the international organisations, and thus also ensure that the partner countries achieve an even greater voice on how also the Danish multilateral development assistance is to be used.

Denmark wants the multilateral development cooperation to be relevant and effective. In the concrete allocation of the Danish development assistance, focus must continuously be on where the funds will benefit the most. How can the priorities of the Danish development policy best be pursued with due respect for the different mandates of the organisations? How to ensure maximum benefit from each of the Danish multilateral development assistance donations – and where can we achieve maximum impact? it is also a key issue to find out how Danish development assistance can help to strengthen the international development cooperation by encouraging decisive reforms in the multilateral architecture of development cooperation.

Denmark will continue its active multilateral development engagement with Danish assistance focusing on fewer organisations in order to achieve greater influence on the policy making and development of selected organisations.