International development policy and cooperation are shaped by multilateral institutions at the UN level, International Financial Institutions (IFIs), the OECD, the European Union, the G20 and a number of smaller and larger bilateral ’donors’. OeFSE follows the international norms and discourses on changes in the global political, economic and ecological framework that have relevance for development policy.
In recent years, OeFSE's has contributed to the debate on the European Union's ‘Team Europe’ initiative, public development finance as well as export finance in the context of climate change and other crises, developments in Official Development Assistance (ODA) and its reporting directives, initiatives in the area of Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development (PCSD), the Aid Effectiveness Agenda (Paris Declaration 2005), the Busan Partnership Agreement (2011) and the 2030-Agenda. Since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, the 2030-Agenda has been a central frame of reference for OeFSE's work.
The fact that this global frame of reference is relevant to the entire field of development research results in interfaces between our various areas of academic and applied research work. Various aspects of the global discourse are therefore taken up and discussed with Austrian development cooperation actors on the basis of publications, events and other expert interventions.