Externe Publikationen

What will the global development architecture look like in 2030? And what can the EU and UK do to influence it?

Sumner, Andy / Stephan Klingebiel
Externe Publikationen (2025)

published on www.globalpolicyjournal.com, 27.11.2025

Volltext/Full text

The world is moving away from a single, post-2000 consensus around multilateralism and poverty reduction. What replaces it depends on which coalition wins the argument, and then bakes that argument into institutions and finance. So what are the visions for the global development architecture in 2030 that we see? One is ‘Aid Retrenchment with Nationalist Conditionality’. Assistance is folded into foreign, trade, and interior policy. Grants shrink, multilateral agencies are sidelined, and cooperation becomes bilateral deals tied to migration control, geopolitical alignment, or access to minerals. Rights, gender, and climate justice recede. A second world is ‘Strategic Multilateralism’. The multilateral development banks stay central, but their remit narrows to macro-stability, crisis response, and “risk containment”. Concessional finance is rationed to countries seen as fragile or geostrategic. Aid rhetoric turns technocratic and securitised and health framed as biosecurity. A third vision is ‘Pluralist Development Cooperation’. There is no single system, but many partially overlapping regimes: Chinese, Indian, Gulf, regional, and club initiatives. Low and middle income countries gain bargaining space by choosing across offers. The trade-off is fragmentation. Rules on debt workouts, safeguards, and transparency diverge, and global public goods struggle for predictable funding. Finally, a fourth vision is ‘Global Solidarity 2.0’. Development cooperation is rebuilt around shared risks such as climate stability, pandemics, antimicrobial resistance, and debt contagion. North and South co-lead a pooled Global Public Goods Facility. Contributions reflect income and carbon profile, and access reflects exposure to cross-border risk. The donor-recipient binary fades, even if frictions persist.

Über den IDOS-Autor

Weitere IDOS-Expert*innen zu diesem Thema