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With the Cotonou Agreement due to expire in 2020, formal negotiations towards a new partnership agreement between the EU and African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states began in September 2018. Based on the acceptance of the EU's negotiating mandate, the new arrangement will be primarily organised via three specific regional protocols with each of the ACP regions. Meanwhile, the Joint Africa-EU Strategy (JAES) launched in 2007, has seen the African Union (AU) gain increased prominence as an institutional partner of the EU. Given its ambitious pan-African agenda, it adopted an alternative 'African' vision for future EU-ACP relations, to the mandate agreed by the ACP states and expressed a willingness to become directly involved in the negotiations. This article contributes an important new case-study to the existing literature on 'African agency' in international politics by considering the scope for Africa to exert agency within the post-Cotonou negotiations, given the negotiation of a specific regional compact with Africa. It adopts a structurally embedded view of agency, based on Cox's understanding of historical structures, as a fit between institutions, ideas and material relations. The central argument is that, in comparison to the negotiation of the Cotonou Agreement two decades ago, there is greater scope for African agency. However, both the ideational and material aspects of Africa's relationship with the EU, condition the limits to how effective such agency might be. Moreover, tensions at the institutional level between the ACP and AU further undermine the potential for effective African agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article traces the formation of Africa's position in view of the negotiations with the European Union for a successor to the Cotonou Agreement set to expire in February 2020, providing some explanations for the failure of the ACP Group and the African Union to achieve a consolidated position. By examining official discourses and the role of different actors, it demonstrates that the ACP Group and the AU manifested alternative views on the EU-ACP cooperation model and on the part that each wished to play in the negotiation and implementation of the future agreement. Moreover, it shows how, in spite of previous frictions, the ACP Secretariat and ACP Committee of Ambassadors on the one hand and the AU Commission and the AU Permanent Representatives Committee on the other formed two separate common fronts to defend their territories and preserve (or increase) their role as the EU's legitimate interlocutors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2000 the cooperation between the European Union (EU) and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states has been governed through the Cotonou Partnership Agreement. This article complements existing research that focuses on Brussels-based stakeholders with an analysis drawing on the existing literature and on stakeholders' perceptions of ACP–EU cooperation and ACP institutions gathered via interviews in nine ACP countries. The findings presented observe a social disconnect between, on the one hand, the Cotonou Partnership Agreement's institutions and Brussels-based representatives, and, on the other hand, the broad-based and multistakeholder partnership they are tasked to promote. The article points to low levels of support in ACP countries, particularly in Africa, to continued ACP–EU cooperation in its present form, and stresses the need for an open and participatory process of reviewing and reshaping ACP–EU relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The changes made to the Cotonou Agreement in its first formal Review in 2005 are considered. Although some of these, to the political dimensions chapter of Cotonou, may appear to fundamentally alter the EU-ACP relationship, the author argues that it is the changes to the management of the EDF that are likely to have the more important long-term impact on implementation. These occurred partly in the 2005 Review, but also in revisions made in the same period to the financial regulations governing the use of the EDF. The Review allowed the EU to update Cotonou to reflect recent international thinking on development policy and also to cater for the funding needs of its increasingly close relationship with the African Union. This latter relationship is in fact starting to outshine that with the ACP Group that the Agreement actually covers, which suggests that further, perhaps more radical, adjustments can be expected during the next review in 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]