The EU’s Global Gateway Needs Democracy to Work

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told a room full of world leaders something most of them already knew but none had said out loud: the rules-based international order is over. Not just fading or under pressure, but over. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” he said, adding the thing that matters most for this argument: “When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.”

Carney was talking about trade and sovereignty. But his logic applies just as directly to the hundreds of billions of euros the EU is pouring into infrastructure across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific through its Global Gateway investment initiative. In a world where rules no longer hold by default, the question for Europe is not just what it builds abroad, but whether the people it builds for have any power over what happens next.

Despite the sums involved, it is hard to paint a comprehensive picture of where exactly the Global Gateway money is going. There is no publicly available breakdown of the initiative’s spending by governance or regime type in recipient countries. Until this data is tracked and published, it is not possible to assess whether the EU’s stated principles are being met in practice. Any comprehensive audit of the Global Gateway’s portfolio would require transparency that is currently not there. In the meantime, the EU’s commitment to democratic values must be operationalised within the Global Gateway if the initiative is to deliver on its promise.

Delivery or decoration?

The EU has committed over €300 billion ($340 billion) in public and private investment through the Global Gateway. At the October 2025 Global Gateway Forum, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that Team Europe had already surpassed this target. Together, the EU and its member states had mobilised over €306 billion ($347 billion) in four years, and von der Leyen was confident the initiative would exceed €400 billion ($454 billion) by 2027. She said that the essence and success of the Global Gateway lay in genuine partnerships based on respect, shared interests, and long-term commitment.

European Commissioner for International Partnerships Jozef Síkela has framed the strategy as being about “creating a stable, transparent investment climate for the private sector to step in and deliver lasting impact”. The Global Gateway’s founding communication lists six principles for the initiative, including “democratic values and high standards” and “good governance and transparency”.

The Global Gateway is not just one initiative among others. Under the current commission, it seems to have become the organising framework for the EU’s external action. The union’s proposed 2028–34 multiannual budget merges previous external funding instruments into a single Global Europe pillar worth €200 billion ($227 billion), representing a 45% increase on the current budget for external action. The dedicated thematic instrument that currently backs democracy, human rights, and civil society has no standalone equivalent in the new proposal.

In October 2025, the commission launched the Global Gateway Investment Hub, a platform designed to connect European companies with EU financial support for projects in partner countries, with a minimum threshold of €10 million ($11 million) per project. Blended finance and export credit agencies are gaining prominence in the EU’s external action strategy. The union is rapidly building the institutional infrastructure for mobilising private capital, but mechanisms for ensuring democratic governance are not keeping up the pace.

The question is whether the principles that underpin the Global Gateway are operational or just decorative. The European Parliament’s March 2026 report on the initiative started to provide an answer. The report deplored “the lack of clarity and transparency regarding the funding track record and how the figure of EUR 306 billion was reached”. It further considered that the selection of projects was overly centralised, top down, and lacking the involvement of relevant stakeholders, such as parliaments in partner countries and civil society, leading to an accountability deficit.

This matters because the EU is dealing with a highly volatile governance landscape. Data from the CIVICUS Monitor, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, and other indices consistently shows that most countries have continued to autocratise over the past decade. The EU is increasingly channelling investment through governments that are less representative, less transparent, and less inclined to ensure democratic accountability. The notion of country ownership is empty when the government in question has no interest in sharing that ownership with its citizens.

An analysis by the Center for Global Development found that Global Gateway flagship projects are overwhelmingly concentrated in physical infrastructure: around half are in climate and energy, while less than 10% are in education and research. A study by Oxfam, Counter Balance, and Eurodad found that over 60% of projects analysed benefit at least one European company.

However, there is no data on how many Global Gateway projects include a democracy, governance, or civic space component, nor is there any comprehensive mapping of investments against civic space indicators. A report by the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM) noted that the EU’s current funding framework has struggled to integrate governance, local ownership, and conflict sensitivity into Global Gateway investments, particularly in fragile contexts.

Two competitive models of development

The EU does not operate in a vacuum, and there is no question that it needs to adapt its development instruments to the new geopolitical reality. A January 2026 report by the European Democracy Hub on China’s development playbook made the competitive picture clear. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has signed memorandums of understanding with 150 countries. In 2024 alone, China issued $6.1 billion in bank loans and over $120 billion in BRI contracts – the latter funded through a mix of accumulated credit lines, buyer credits, commercial co-financing, and host-country contributions – outpacing the Global Gateway, which had a much slower start at mobilising investment.

However, the two models differ in important ways. The EU has long presented its development cooperation as guided by democracy, human rights, good governance, and the rule of law. China’s approach is explicitly built on noninterference and the absence of political conditionality. Chinese development financing does not exclusively target authoritarian regimes, but a large part of its commercial flows is concentrated in countries with weak institutions, lax regulatory environments, and limited civil society. The European Democracy Hub’s report found that for every 10% rise in corruption, there is an average increase of 69% in access to Chinese credit, and that the least democratic borrower can expect to receive nearly 10 times more lending from Beijing than the most democratic counterpart.

China’s approach also goes beyond building physical infrastructure. The Chinese Communist Party’s International Department maintains ties with over 520 political parties across 171 countries, runs cadre training programmes, supports political-party schools, and exports digital-surveillance infrastructure that strengthens authoritarian capacity. The European Democracy Hubs’ report described how Chinese companies like Huawei helped Ugandan and Zambian government forces access the mobile phones of opposition politicians and activists. The digital infrastructure programme under the EU’s Global Gateway, by contrast, focuses primarily on submarine cables and connectivity and has not yet developed a comprehensive response to the export of authoritarian technology ecosystems.

The EU claims its model is different because it is values based. But the credibility of that claim depends entirely on whether those values translate into operational decisions on the ground. The European Parliament has flagged a particularly uncomfortable dimension of this problem. EU lawmakers are “concerned by reports that a number of Global Gateway projects are being implemented by Chinese companies in direct violation of the initiative’s objective of presenting an alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative and creating genuine national value in partner countries” and have called for “an immediate investigation into the involvement of all Chinese companies in the Global Gateway”.

People are not just consumers of infrastructure. They are the reason it exists. A road built without the consent of the communities it cuts through will eventually face resistance. A data centre built in a country where the government can use it for mass surveillance will eventually become a liability. A renewable-energy project that displaces farming communities without proper consultation and fair compensation will end up in court – or, worse, abandoned. None of this is hypothetical: these are real-life examples.

The EU’s Supporting an Enabling Environment for Civil Society (SEE) project, which operates in 86 countries, has been tracking this pattern in real time. Data from February 2026 recorded 48 deterioration alerts out of a total of 77 cases, showing that the enabling environment for civil society is shrinking fast in most regions where the Global Gateway operates. In Indonesia, President Prabowo Subianto publicly accused civil society organisations (CSOs) that work with international actors of serving foreign interests. In El Salvador, a new foreign-agents law targets nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) that receive international funds, while anticorruption activists sit in detention. In Burundi, arrests of civil society leaders ahead of elections signalled exactly the kind of pre-election clampdown that makes any investment environment unpredictable.

Every one of these countries is a Global Gateway target state. The EU is investing in their infrastructure while the conditions that make those investments viable are being dismantled.

The European democracy support annual review 2025 documented a parallel trend in EU institutions. Democracy funding remains small, while other areas, like the Global Gateway or defence, are being beefed up. The EU has cut democracy-support capacity in delegations across several countries, including Belarus, Eritrea, Haiti, South Sudan, and Timor-Leste while boosting capacity in regional hubs focused on mobilising investment.

Civic space is not an obstacle to investment efficiency; it is the infrastructure that makes investment sustainable. The sooner this is acknowledged at all levels of EU external action, the more competitive the union and its democratic partners will be.

Without counterpowers, corruption wins

There is a practical argument here that does not require anyone to care about human rights, good governance, or democracy in the abstract. It is about money.

A May 2026 investigation by the journalism platform Follow The Money into EU election support in Africa found that the union had spent nearly €200 million ($228 million) on elections across sub-Saharan Africa since 2019, with nearly €50 million ($57 million) for Nigeria alone. While funding electoral-management bodies is a necessary part of supporting elections, the investigation found that in the cases examined, much of the EU’s support disproportionately benefited institutional actors and ruling-party infrastructure. CSOs involved in voter education, election monitoring, and civic engagement received considerably less funding, and the EU largely ignored critical reports from its own observation missions.

In Nigeria, after €18 million ($20 million) went on training electoral officers to use new voting systems, the technology failed on election day. The EU’s observation mission concluded that the 2023 vote “did not ensure a well-run transparent, and inclusive democratic process”. Nigerian journalist Idris Akinbajo told Follow The Money that “the disappointment was so great that many young voters resolved never to vote again – trust had been lost”.

This matters when it comes to the Global Gateway because it shows that the EU can get its own democracy support wrong when it invests in state machinery without investing in the civic ecosystem that holds that machinery accountable. Infrastructure alone, whether physical or electoral, does not produce democratic outcomes: what matters is that counterpowers are in place.

When civic space closes more broadly, the first thing that disappears is availability of and access to independent information. Journalists are arrested, NGO monitoring stops, whistleblowers lose protection, and corruption becomes invisible to everyone except the people who profit from it. Watchdog organisations such as Transparency International have been making this case for years: without open data systems, safe channels for reporting, and CSOs that track how public money is spent, infrastructure funds are captured by elites.

The New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights has documented that companies operating in countries with restricted civic freedoms face higher operational costs, more unpredictable regulatory environments, and greater exposure to reputational damage. Human rights defenders, independent journalists, and local NGOs function as early warning systems for the private sector.

The World Bank reached the same conclusion from a different direction. Its Business Enabling Environment framework explicitly identifies civic space and citizen engagement as variables in assessing whether private-sector development can actually work. The practical conditions for doing business deteriorate alongside the conditions for exercising political rights.

Enabling environments for civil society and business

This is the argument that European policymakers need to hear and that the democracy-support community has not made loudly enough. Predictable regulation, enforceable contracts, transparent procurement, and credible dispute resolution are all outcomes of systems in which citizens can organise, media can report, and courts can act independently. Remove any one of those, and the investment environment degrades. Any investor who has operated in a country where the courts answer to the executive knows this already.

The EU SEE data shows this working in both directions. In Kenya, the government included civil society in the drafting of the Public Benefit Organizations Act, with nationwide public forums and a transparent process. In Zambia, CSOs were officially brought into consultations on electoral reform. In Timor-Leste, a new grant programme channels funding directly to local organisations for policy monitoring. In Malaysia, sustained advocacy from CSOs and youth leaders resulted in legal reforms that protect peaceful assembly. In Panama, even amid aggressive crackdowns on social protest, the supreme court ruled to protect the freedom of expression by raising legal standards against abusive defamation lawsuits.

These are the institutional conditions that make markets function, and they exist because someone invested in building them. The evidence base for this is growing. The toolkit on civic space developed in 2025 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development synthesises much of the current research. It draws on evidence showing, among other findings, that a 1% increase in civil liberties generates a 0.05% reduction in national CO₂ emissions, linking open civic space directly to climate outcomes that sit at the heart of the Global Gateway’s green transition agenda.

Two studies commissioned by the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law show that an empowered civil society operating in an open civic space is strongly associated with positive outcomes on food security, government effectiveness, anticorruption, and gender equality, while civic space restrictions correlate with the opposite. A 2024 study by the European Democracy Hub found that investing in resilience to prevent democratic backsliding is significantly more cost effective than attempting to reverse autocratisation once it has taken hold.

The May 2026 Africa Forward Summit, co-hosted by Kenya and France, provided a live illustration of what a different approach looks like. The summit brought together more than 2,000 participants, including 30 heads of state, alongside business leaders, civil society representatives, and young entrepreneurs. Kenyan President William Ruto emphasised the importance of mobilising African capital for African development priorities and strengthening partnerships between governments and the private sector to drive industrialisation, infrastructure development, job creation, and inclusive economic growth.

Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of building an “equal-to-equal partnership” with Africa and argued that the continent “needs investment to strengthen its sovereignty rather than dependence”. The summit’s founding statement described it as “a paradigm shift to a more balanced, equitable, and mutually respectful partnership”, with civil society and youth representatives given seats at the table alongside heads of state and chief executives. This is the model in which the enabling environments for civil society and for business reinforce each other.

Meaningful engagement, however, means more than offering civil society a seat at the table or on an advisory platform. Existing mechanisms, such as the Global Gateway Civil Society and Local Authorities Advisory Platform, provide a space for consultation but not co-decision. Civil society can speak but has no formal role in project design, implementation, or accountability. Over 50 CSOs wrote an open letter to Síkela in 2025 expressing concern that current consultation structures are insufficient to ensure the Global Gateway delivers on its stated principles. If the EU wants local populations to have genuine ownership of the infrastructure being built in their name, participation cannot be an afterthought: it needs to translate into actionable mechanisms beyond mere consultations.

A strategy that delivers

The Treaty on European Union commits the EU to advance democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and fundamental freedoms in all its external action, which includes the Global Gateway. A 2026 European Parliament report pointed to what that commitment should look like in practice, calling for the Global Gateway to complement investments with support for the rule of law, judicial independence, anticorruption, transparency, and accountability. The report demanded that Global Gateway investments benefit both businesses and civil society at the local level.

The parliament further insisted that for the Global Gateway to be effective, it must respond to partner countries’ real priorities and be designed with local stakeholders. These are not soft asks from a marginal committee. This is the co-legislator of the next EU external action budget speaking.

As the European Democracy Hub’s report on China’s development playbook concludes, the EU has long invested in civil society, good governance, and democratic institutions, and this has been a genuine competitive advantage. European donors invest around €4 billion ($4.5 billion) a year in core democracy support, a fraction of total official development assistance, but one that has built partnerships, expertise, and trust that China’s approach cannot replicate. If the EU walks away from this as it pivots to infrastructure, it gives up the one thing that differentiates its offer.

Civil society and other actors committed to supporting the EU’s founding values do more than advocate from the outside. They make investments viable, institutions accountable, and partnerships credible. The objective here is not to contest the Global Gateway but to ensure that democracy, civic space, and the agency of local populations are structurally embedded within it – not as an afterthought, not as a box-ticking exercise, and not through scattered projects on the margins of programming.

This requires a political commitment to dedicate resources to democratic governance as an integral part of every Global Gateway investment, whether the EU is implementing a project directly or channelling funds through development finance institutions and multilateral development banks under the Team Europe umbrella. A concrete starting point would be to allocate a small but meaningful percentage of Global Gateway budgets to democracy and rights-related components. That would mean structurally embedding those elements by integrating rule-of-law strengthening, anticorruption safeguards, and civic participation from the design phase onwards and involving local communities in this process. It would also require recording and publishing data on Global Gateway spending according to recipients’ levels of democratic governance, to allow for independent monitoring of how the initiative adheres to its commitments.

If the EU gets this right, the returns will go far beyond protecting investments from corruption and instability. It will mean that the people who use the roads, energy grids, and digital networks – the communities whose lives these projects are supposed to improve – have ownership of their development. It will mean that infrastructure built under the Global Gateway generates economic returns while strengthening civic life, democratic participation, and the capacity of local populations to shape their own governance. That is what differentiates a genuine partnership from a mere transaction. It is ultimately how the EU proves that its values-based model delivers something that the alternatives cannot: sustainable development that works for the people it is meant to serve.

Carney told Davos that middle powers must stop living “within the lie”. He invoked the story of former Czech President Václav Havel’s fictional greengrocer, who places a sign in his window every morning not because he believes what it says but because compliance keeps the system going. Europe’s version of that lie is pretending you can build a values-based alternative to China’s infrastructure model while defunding the institutions that make it values based. The EU has committed over €300 billion and is heading toward €400 billion. It has the institutional architecture and the treaty obligations. Now it needs the political courage to make democracy operational, not just rhetorical, and put it at the heart of the Global Gateway.

The EU has an opportunity to be creative and ambitious in how it supports local populations’ ownership of their futures. If it takes that opportunity, the Global Gateway can become the crown jewel in EU external action: an initiative that delivers on the promise of its principles. If it does not, it risks becoming the sign in the greengrocer’s window.

 

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This publication was produced with the financial support of the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

Photo credit: Christophe Licoppe, European Union, 2025