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Working Better Together in a Team Europe Approach

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public
EU-official
Last Updated: 05 December 2025
A tool to help EU Delegations work better together with Member States as Team Europe and with like-minded partners and country stakeholders, through Team Europe Initiatives, joint programming and joint implementation.

Table of contents

1.3.2. Contributing to the 2030 Agenda in a changing global context

A coherent and coordinated approach to EU external action will be important for the successful implementation of the 2030 Agenda globally.

European Consensus on Development, 2017

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development sets out 17 SDGs that are ‘integrated and indivisible and balance the three dimensions of sustainable development: the economic, social and environmental’. The 2030 Agenda also provides a commitment to ‘leave no one behind’, implying that complex issues related to exclusion and inequality within and between countries need to be accorded a higher priority. The principle of ‘leaving no one behind’ also requires both development and humanitarian actors to work together to address the needs of the most vulnerable people. To achieve the targets associated with the 17 SDGs, new partnerships, the increased use of innovative financing, and new networks of collaboration need to be explored19.

The Global Gateway strategy and the Global Strategy also acknowledge a changing global order, marked by threats of new trade wars and the return of confrontational geopolitics. With official development assistance (ODA) declining as a share of total development finance, if we want it to remain relevant to our partner countries it is important to both ensure the (development) effectiveness of collective ODA and to engage a volume of additional financing beyond ODA. Partner countries face an increasing number of actors and a diversity of relationships, and levels of fragility, so it is important for actors following a Team Europe approach to work in a coordinated and coherent way to ensure that our support is effective and to safeguard and enhance the partnerships and influence of the EU in a changing global context.

Taking a Team Europe approach can:

  • advance a joint EU human-rights based geopolitical response to a changing global context;
  • have an enabling impact on resources by integrating public and private flows, in addition to achieving additionality;
  • increase the EU’s visibility and influence;
  • make it possible to use flexible and country-tailored methods and tools;
  • strengthen the links between activities in the humanitarian, development and peace sectors;
  • boost European partnerships by reinforcing the links between policy and political dialogue;
  • make EU development cooperation and external action more inclusive through a broader and more diverse EU offer.

19 UN General Assembly, Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, 21 October 2015, A/RES/70/1, available at https://daccess-ods.un.org/access.nsf/Get?OpenAgent&DS=A/RES/70/1&Lang=E