The New Spanish Cooperation Law: A Decisive Step at the Halfway Point

Thursday, 24November was an intense day at the Congress of Deputies, the lower house of the Spanish Parliament. Reactions to unacceptable personal remarks directed at the Minister of Equality the previous day had siphoned attention away from the previously all-consuming task of approving the General State Budget for 2023. As the stroke of midnight approached, the debate and subsequent passage of the Cooperation for Sustainable Development and Global Solidarity Bill—in whose drafting we participated—went all but unnoticed.

Why is this law important for ISGlobal? Because development cooperation is a fundamental public policy for fulfilling our institutional mission of converting the excellent scientific knowledge we produce into interventions and actions that improve global and human health from an equity perspective. This is something that we have been doing for years in Mozambique, Bolivia and Morocco—among many other countries—through health-related development programmes and projects. Thanks to this extensive experience, we have long been aware of the need to update a legal framework that dates back to 1998.

Development cooperation is a fundamental public policy for fulfilling our institutional mission of converting the excellent scientific knowledge we produce into interventions and actions that improve global and human health from an equity perspective

The new legal framework must not only conform to the evolving international development agenda, which has revolved around the Sustainable Development Goals since their adoption in 2015; it must also lay the groundwork for a new cooperation model capable of meeting global challenges through the creation, transfer and translation of knowledge, while also promoting innovation, impact orientation and a partnership-based approach to work. The combination of all these elements will make it possible to maximise Spain’s contributions to global health, thereby helping to address the numerous challenges that exist in today’s world—many of which have been accentuated, if not exacerbated, by the COVID-19 pandemic. We pushed for such an outcome throughout the process of drafting the bill and have succeeded in ensuring that it does indeed define an appropriate general framework from this global health perspective. However, as the title of this post suggests, although this constitutes a decisive step in the right direction, it still only gets us halfway to where we want to be.

Niakamoro health center in Bamako (Mali), where UNICEF has carried out health and nutrition programs with the support of Cooperación Española. Photo: Miguel Lizana / AECID

For starters, the bill has yet to become a law. It still faces legislative hurdles in the Senate: if amendments are introduced, the text will be sent back to the Congress of Deputies, which will have to accept or reject them for the final passage of the bill. If no amendments are proposed, final passage will take place in the Senate itself. More important than the ultimate form of the bill is the need to accelerate the legislative process in order to consolidate and broaden the consensus of the various political groups around the law, which has been opposed only by Vox.

Throughout the rest of this journey, those of us in the Policy and Global Development Department will strive to deepen this transformation from a global health perspective so that the opportunity that this new law unquestionably represents can become a reality

Once the law has been passed, then comes the task of building out this framework and developing a new model of development cooperation aligned with all other international actors—a framework that optimises our country’s vast technical and human capital and leverages the added value of some of our hallmarks, such as the role of regional and local cooperation. In the coming months, regulations will have to be developed to flesh out various aspects envisaged by the law. Strategic documents such as the 4^th Master Plan for Spanish Cooperation, as well as specific strategies on health and multilateral cooperation, will also have to be drawn up in accordance with this new law. Finally, it will be necessary to review regulatory instruments and administrative tools to effectively forge partnerships and eliminate obstacles to the real involvement of all parties called upon to play an important role in global development. Throughout the rest of this journey, those of us in the Policy and Global Development Department will strive to deepen this transformation from a global health perspective so that the opportunity that this new law unquestionably represents can become a reality.