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On 23 November 2023, the European Centre of Excellence for Civilian Crisis Management (CoE) hosted an online workshop on the topic ‘Processes for the return of seconded civil servants to their home agencies’. This workshop report summarises the discussions from the workshop and includes findings connected to challenges, good practices, and possible new solutions on these processes.

This overview aims to present the key findings and suggested ways to strengthen CSDP-JHA cooperation, based on three workshops held in 2021 and 2022, bringing Member States, EU institutions and agencies, and civilian CSDP missions together in a so-called triangular approach. Key findings are categorised under narrative, policy, strategic and operational levels.

In a series of three workshops with a triangular approach (EU Member States, EU institutions and the missions), this last one focused on the operational orientation on CSDP-JHA cooperation. Operational examples showcased the added value for Member States, the seconding services and the secondees, among other aspects knowledge and experience transfer from the field into the national services. The missions also showed through these operational examples the value of receiving and returning expertise from and to the Member States.

On 17 June 2022, 21 EU Member States as well as EEAS- and EC-representatives gathered in Berlin for the CoE Civilian CSDP Summer Forum to reflect in an informal setting on the Level of Ambition (LoA) for civilian CSDP, focusing on type, number, size and geographical scope of civilian CSDP missions.

In 2021, the informal NIP Cluster led by Finland and Spain and supported by the European Centre of Excellence for Civilian Crisis Management (CoE), organised a series of virtual workshops where Member States and EU institutions presented examples of national and EU policies and practices to ensure equal opportunities for women and men seconded to in civilian CSDP missions and to improve gender balance. This compilation of recommendations and actions is an outcome of those workshops.

Cluster 5 virtual workshop "Strategic Communication and Women’s Representation in Civilian CSDP Missions", held on 21 June 2022, combined two important cross-cutting themes of the Civilian CSDP Compact: increasing women’s participation in civilian CSDP Missions at all levels and strategic communication, which both have a dedicated informal Cluster working group to enhance the implementation of the Compact commitments. Strategic communication has also been identified as one of the four key areas of strategic engagement in the Strategy and Action Plan to enhance women’s participation in civilian CSDP missions 2021-2024 (14885/21).

Through these key takeaways, the Centre of Excellence for Civilian Crisis Management (CoE) offers its members practical suggestions to be used and adapted to each system to reach the common commitment of increasing secondment. During the workshop, challenges and good practices among national systems were identified. The latter could enable secondments.

The European Centre of Excellence for Civilian Crisis Management (CoE) facilitated a workshop on the augmentation of pre-mission training, bringing together key stakeholders for discussions on how to increase the number of adequately prepared new CSDP mission staff. This report summarises the key take-aways and recommendations and proposes possible follow-up actions.

On 8 October 2021, the third Cluster 5 virtual workshop on women’s participation in civilian CSDP Missions was held focusing on work-life balance in civilian crisis management missions. It explored some of the challenges of reconciling work, private and family life, which has been identified as a barrier affecting particularly women’s opportunities and choices to seek deployment in crisis management missions. Removing barriers and promoting conducive working environment affects positively the recruitment and retention of women experts. Studies have shown that policies and practices designed to encourage work-life balance can play an important role in attracting, motivating and retaining highly skilled and diverse experts.

You will find here the report of a workshop on the secondment of Experts outside of Public Service (EoPS) jointly organised by the CoE and the Chair of NIP Cluster 2. It summarises key takeaways, extracted from both the upstream analysis of member-states (MS) practices and the presentations and discussions happening in the workshop. Additionally, the presentations by the CoE, Denmark and the Netherlands are linked.