This paper rethinks the European Union’s evolving role as a global development actor by examining its growing entanglement with Korea’s development finance architecture. Against the backdrop of the EU’s Global Gateway strategy and the expanding role of the European Investment Bank (EIB), the paper argues that Korea has become a pivotal site for observing how European development cooperation is being reshaped through financialised instruments and geopolitical competition. Anchored in Busan’s 2011 shift toward private capital mobilisation, I analyse how Korea’s development banks (Korea Eximbank, KDB, and the EDCF) deploy blended finance, guarantees, and export credits across Asia and Africa, often in parallel or partnership with EU-funded initiatives.

Central to this transformation is the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which has emerged as a flagship multilateral vehicle for mobilising private finance for climate mitigation and adaptation. I show how the EU’s engagement with the GCF and Korean development banks illustrates the merging of climate, security, and competitiveness logics within contemporary development finance. Korea’s hybrid position (as donor, EU partner, and actor economically interdependent with China and Japan amid a shifting US posture) offers a laboratory for understanding how the EU’s development model is being recalibrated in a multipolar order.

Empirically, the paper traces project pipelines and co-/parallel financing in energy and digital infrastructure where EU, Korean, and Chinese actors overlap, assessing implications for governance, transparency, and distributive outcomes. The paper contributes a Korea-centred perspective to EU development studies, illuminating how middle-power banking and climate finance reshape accountability, partnership norms, and inclusive growth under Global Gateway.

Global Gateway is widely framed as the European Union’s answer to the return of great-power competition, mobilizing infrastructure and industrial policy tools to secure supply chains, diversify dependencies and project European values. Yet behind its geopolitical rhetoric lies a governance system driven by technocratic evaluations and fragmented institutional practices. While analyses of Global Gateway’s financial architecture have noted concerns about dispersed authority and limited stakeholder ownership, it remains unclear how the EU’s emerging geoeconomic orientation shapes decision-making across its external engagement. This article argues that the EU’s geoeconomic turn is emerging from entrenched administrative and financial logics rather than from deliberate strategic steering, as a form of technocratic gatekeeping by default. The result is a geoeconomic strategy shaped less by (geo)-political steering than by financial and economic risk-assessment logics.

Empirically, the article combines document analysis with semi-structured interviews with officials from the European Commission, the European External Action Service, and representatives of key Council working parties (RELEX, CoAFR, CoASI). It further draws on exchanges with development finance institutions as well as business associations and civil-society organisations. Process-tracing of several flagship projects reconstructs how inputs from the Business Advisory Group, Council working parties and civil-society platforms are filtered through financial assessments and informal coordination formats. In doing so, the article advances debates on the EU’s geoeconomic turn, industrial-policy governance and informal EU decision-making. It shows that Global Gateway centralises authority informally and selectively, relying on technocratic and financial gatekeeping while leaving formal hierarchies, political deliberation and democratic oversight underdeveloped. This pattern suggests that Europe’s new geoeconomic posture is emerging not through intentional strategic redesign but through the incremental repurposing of existing bureaucratic and financial practices.

The four UN Financing for Development Conferences held so far orientate public policy efforts by governments and multilateral organisations for financing development. Each of these Conferences’ is influenced by their world context, which in turn determines the development challenges identified and prioritised internationally, the solutions that are envisaged for them, the actors involved or the level of consensus that governments are able to reach; all of which condition the evolution of the financing for development agenda.

Indeed, consensuses and assumptions that inform development policy internationally are a reflection of the economic and development thinking that is prevalent at each moment in time. In the case of the financing for development agenda, the Monterrey Conference of 2002 was heavily focused on economic growth, structuralist economic thinking and the Millenium Development Goals, whereas the subsequent 2008 Doha Conference was highly influenced by the evident shortcomings of the international economic system that had led to the financial crisis. The Addis Ababa Conference in 2015 reflected a growing awareness of the global nature of development challenges, notably climate change, and the logic surrounding the Sustainable Development Goals, whereas the 2025 Sevilla Conference has taken place in a context of retreat and questioning from multilateralism on the part of great powers.

This evolution of ideas is extensively documented in academia; different paradigms of development have historically coexisted, interacted with each other and succeeded one another in development thinking. It exists, too, in policy, as the successive Financing for Development Conferences show. The evolution and consolidation of broadly accepted (‘mainstream’) ideas is an incremental process constrained by political economy factors, including experience, capacity, path dependencies or institutionalised structures.

The goal of this paper is therefore to analyse whether the conceptualisation of international development financing challenges has evolved over time, and how this evolution relates to the changing prevalence, nature or interaction of different strands of development thinking. This will be answered through a discourse analysis of the outcome documents of the successive UN Financing for Development Conferences, which represent the international consensus point in development finance policy in each moment in time. The analysis will capture the ideas around central development debates identified by the literature: the prioritisation of development goals, the respective roles of state and market, historically/geographically differentiated development paths, and the role of international forces. The findings will inform future research on how equilibria among different world views are constructed in international negotiating spaces.

Since the 2010s, the rise of China, intensifying great-power rivalry, a more ambivalent US attitude towards Europe and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have placed European integration at a critical juncture. Long positioning itself as a normative power, exerting influence through soft power and the diffusion of liberal norms, the EU increasingly operates in a global environment where economic interdependence is politicised, supply chains are weaponised, and power competition has returned to the centre of international politics. In response, EU institutions have begun to recalibrate their external posture, emphasising strategic autonomy, resilience, and the strategic use of economic instruments. Recent policy initiatives and strategic documents point towards an emerging geoeconomic orientation, in which trade, industrial policy, investment screening, technological standards, and supply-chain governance can be deployed to protect European interests and project external influence. This paper examines the implications of this shift for the EU’s identity and deeply embedded normative foundations. It asks: to what extent can the EU transform into a geoeconomic actor without undermining its self-conception as a normative, rules-based power?

Building on debates on Normative Power Europe and geoeconomics, the paper argues that this transformation is neither linear nor unproblematic. While geoeconomic instruments may strengthen strategic autonomy and external agency, they also generate tensions with core EU norms such as openness, multilateralism, and non-coercion. The increasing instrumentalisation of economic power risks blurring the boundary between normative influence and strategic coercion, potentially affecting the EU’s external legitimacy and internal cohesion. By analysing this tension, the paper contributes to broader debates on EU actorness, adaptation under conditions of polycrisis, and the future of European integration in a fragmented international order. It argues that the EU’s turn towards geoeconomics represents not a departure from normative power, but a contested and incomplete reconfiguration one that reveals the fragility, limits, and ongoing renegotiation of European identity in an age of geopolitical competition. Methodologically, the paper adopts a qualitative research design drawing on a systematic analysis of EU strategic documents, policy communications, and key legislative initiatives related to strategic autonomy, economic security, and external action. Through interpretive document analysis, the study examines how the EU’s discourse and policy instruments increasingly integrate geoeconomic considerations alongside longstanding normative commitments. By situating these developments within the broader debates on Normative Power Europe and geoeconomics, the paper assesses how the EU’s emerging geoeconomic role both enables and constrains its normative identity.