Bonn, 2 November 2026. From 29 to 30 October, the World Trade Organization (WTO) hosted its 10^th Aid for Trade Global Review in Geneva. Held every two years, the Review is the WTO’s main forum for assessing progress and shaping the future direction for Aid for Trade (AfT). Twenty years after its launch, the anniversary offered a chance to celebrate achievements but also to reflect on the role of AfT in an increasingly fragmented and volatile global economy.

AfT is built around a simple idea. Countries that face high trade costs cannot fully benefit from access to international markets. The scale and focus of the initiative matter. AfT accounts for around one-fifth of Official Development Assistance (ODA) and, according to the WTO, roughly 98 percent of all commitments are directed towards economic infrastructure and productive capacity, with only a small fraction allocated to trade policy and regulatory capacity-building. AfT is therefore far more than a narrow trade-policy instrument. In practice, it helps countries participate more effectively in international trade and thereby supports broader economic development. 

How the debate is changing

This logic now faces a new political reality. Fiscal pressures in donor countries, the increasing politicization of trade, and ideological attacks on development cooperation, which often overstate public scepticism, have changed the terms of the debate on aid. In response, governments have cut aid budgets while more explicitly framing the remaining aid in terms of national interests, for example by emphasizing the employment and export opportunities it creates for domestic firms. 

There is nothing inherently wrong with acknowledging that development cooperation should also generate benefits for donor countries. The problem arises when those benefits become the primary objective rather than a consequence. This distinction is particularly important for AfT, where evidence on the magnitude and significance of donor export gains remains mixed. 

For ODA more broadly, recent research has attracted public attention by identifying substantial positive effects on donor-country exports and employment, including in Germany. Crucially, these effects appear to operate largely through long-term and indirect channels that are not necessarily linked to direct trade support. These findings also point to the need to look beyond immediate contracts and export orders to understand how much of AfT’s value to donors lies in the longer-term economic relationships that development cooperation helps establish.

There are good reasons to adopt this perspective on AfT. By supporting poorer countries in their efforts to cut trade costs, modernise customs procedures, strengthen productive capacity, connect to global value chains and meet international standards, evidence suggests that these interventions can significantly expand recipients’ overall trade performance, particularly in least developed countries. 

The potential benefits, however, extend well beyond recipients’ increased trade capacity. Focusing exclusively on donor export balances thus misses much of the bigger picture. As countries become more successful traders, they may also become more resilient and more reliable economic partners. For highly trade-dependent economies such as Germany, these developments could represent a significant potential benefit in their own right. But emerging research also suggests that donors may benefit through unlocking access to critical raw-material suppliers, forming more sustainable trade partnerships, and building stronger coalitions in support of a rules-based trading system. These effects are harder to capture in simple export statistics, but they may ultimately be more consequential.

Looking ahead

The debate, then, should move beyond the question "What do we get back?” toward a more strategic “What kinds of partnerships are we trying to develop?”. This shift matters not only for the political arena but also for researchers. Future research should go beyond identifying direct effects to examine the causal mechanisms through which AfT generates benefits for donors and recipients alike. Understanding these channels would help guide the strategic design of AfT. 

This is particularly relevant in a trading environment increasingly shaped by industrial policy, economic security, supply-chain concerns, digitalization and artificial intelligence, climate pressures and geopolitics. To remain effective, AfT needs to be understood as a more integrated and comprehensive approach. The programme of this year’s Global Review reflects a broader and more forward-looking understanding of trade integration, highlighting resilience, inclusion, investment and public-private partnerships alongside traditional trade capacity-building.

This broader perspective could pave the way for bringing AfT’s core objectives into closer alignment with realities and adjustment needs of today’s global economy. If well designed, AfT, with its explicit mandate to support development in an interconnected global economy, may be a prime candidate for mutually beneficial partnerships. Twenty years after its launch, that may be one of AfT’s most relevant ideas for the next twenty years.

Bonn, 30 October 2026. UN-Habitat’s Urban October initiative concludes on World Cities Day, 31 October, with this year’s theme “Adequate Housing for All”. The urgent need for housing and other infrastructure to accommodate growing urban populations makes building new cities “from scratch” appear to be an appealing solution. However, such projects frequently fail to address urban development challenges and instead serve hidden political interests – often at the expense of current and future urban residents. 

In May 2026, reports confirmed the end of The Line. Saudi Arabia has halted construction work on its planned 170-kilometer-long linear city until at least 2030. While the project has garnered much international attention due to its unusual scale and design, it is just one example of a much wider phenomenon. Across the world, governments and investors are pursuing over 150 new city projects, primarily in low- and middle-income countries. These projects, based on masterplans for previously undeveloped sites, come with many promises. They are often supposed to address the lack of adequate housing, traffic congestion, environmental pollution, and climate change vulnerabilities. However, analyses suggest that new city projects often fail to live up to these promises, raising two important questions: Why are new city projects still being pursued in such large numbers? And how should development organisations respond when approached for support for such projects?

The idea of building entire new cities responds to a genuine global challenge: urban settlements are growing at an unprecedented pace, especially in Africa and Asia. There are also cases of functioning new cities like Brasilia (Brazil) and Abuja (Nigeria), which show that these projects can work. In recent years, however, a significant number of new city developments have remained incomplete, have struggled with low occupancy, or have been abandoned entirely. There are several reasons why these multibillion-euro projects often fall short of their urban development goals, including planning, management, and financial mistakes. But as we argue in a new policy brief, new city projects also proliferate because of shadow interests – hidden political agendas pursued by powerful elites. These interests may complement or conflict with urban development goals. When shadow interests take precedence over urban development objectives, this may well serve hidden political agendas, but it increases the likelihood that the official urban development goals will not be achieved. 

Shadow interests can include consolidating political power by strengthening clientelist networks, for example by distributing land or awarding contracts to well-connected construction companies. For instance, Egypt’s new administrative capital project has been described by The Economist as a government-scheme to bribe companies with strong links to the military, thereby worsening the country’s rising debt and inflation. Shadow interests can also comprise efforts to assert geopolitical control over contested or strategically important territory, as in the case of Forest City in Malaysia. Forest City was an attempt to establish a Chinese neocolonial enclave in a strategic location as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The project was launched in 2014 and is now an abandoned “ghost city”. Furthermore, shadow interests may include efforts to greenwash and legitimize authoritarian regimes by building eco-cities. An example of this is Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, which was initiated in 2006 as an attempt to position the emirate as a global leader in green innovation. To this day, the city remains vastly underpopulated. As these examples illustrate, when governments prioritise shadow interests over officially stated urban development goals, new city projects are less likely to serve the interests of urban populations.  

Addressing rapid urbanisation requires a broad set of approaches, which may also include new master-planned cities. But recent new city projects promise a lot, have a poor track record, and are often compromised by shadow interests. Such projects therefore risk wasting significant public and private resources – precisely at a time when there is an urgent need for more effective urban investment. Given this risk, development organisations should exercise particular caution when deciding whether to support such new city projects. Ideally, political economy assessments for analysing shadow interests and assessments of potential alternative urban interventions should inform such decisions. This is particularly important in authoritarian or weak state settings where infrastructure projects are more likely to be captured by shadow interests. More incremental interventions, such as upgrading and expanding existing urban settlements tend to be more cost-effective and serve a broader range of residents. Realising “Adequate Housing for All” will ultimately require more participatory approaches to urban planning and development, which also explicitly include the more than one billion people living in informal urban settlements worldwide.

Bonn, 28 October 2026. There is clear evidence that land and ocean use practices and knowledges of Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLC) have contributed significantly to biodiversity conservation. A study from WWF even shows that 91% of IPLC lands are in “good or moderate ecological condition”.

At this year’s Biodiversity COP17 in Yerevan, Indigenous participation is a key topic when negotiators discuss the implementation of Article 8(j) on integrating “Traditional knowledge, innovations and practices”. The provisional agenda promises negotiations on the specifics of how the newly established permanent subsidiary body tasked with its implementation (SB8J) will operate.

While the SB8J is the first permanent body on the topic among the three Rio Conventions, it builds on earlier efforts to strengthen Indigenous participation. Within the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), it is replacing a non-permanent working group established in 1998. Its establishment gives Indigenous Peoples a more secure position within the Convention, reflecting a long-running struggle to institutionalise participation and influence. Within the CBD’s climate counterpart, the UNFCCC, the non-permanent Facilitative Working Group (FWG) is mandated to advance Indigenous issues and is notable for its equal representation of state and IPLC stakeholders.

Negotiators at the Biodiversity COP can take inspiration from the FWG’s successes and failures. According to a report by the group, it has been able to more meaningfully engage with the climate negotiations and provide key inputs that contributed to policy design. However, a considerable number of challenges remain, such as visa restrictions, language barriers and limited financial resources to take part at COPs.

Importantly, some of the most serious challenges to the FWG’s functioning are systemic, unlikely to be fixed within a working group, or a subsidiary body. One of these is a fundamental misalignment between the UNFCCC’s metrics- and market-based approach to governing climate change, and a more relational understanding of the environment held by many IPLC, which considers humans as embedded in webs of life and not separate from nature. These can be difficult to reconcile in a governance setting that seeks to quantify and assign economic value to nature and addresses interrelated concerns of climate, biodiversity, and land degradation in separate Rio Conventions.

Another issue is the framing of Indigenous peoples as primarily vulnerable, rather than as actors with agency, who could actively contribute to multilateral processes. While one of the FWG’s primary functions is to build the capacity of Indigenous peoples to engage in the climate convention’s processes, the agency of any non-state actor within an institution set up by and for national governments will be limited. Despite equal representation within the working group, it remains a non-voting body within a large institution.

Whatever shape the SB8J takes, it will be different from the FWG. It is a permanent body, set up as a “Party-led process”. It is situated within a different Convention, with a longer history of formally engaging with IPLC issues. Yet both bodies operate within an intergovernmental institution, in which decision-making power ultimately lies with national governments.

What the SB8J can learn from the FWG is that its establishment is not a sufficient condition for true participation. IPLC issues and agency require space and resources across COP agendas and governance levels. This includes access to global biodiversity finance mechanisms and territorial rights at the national level. Promising national examples are the Peasant Reserve Zones in Colombia. They were established in 1994 to stabilise the forest frontier, to promote sustainable resource management and to reduce land concentration. Some peasant organisations consider them as a strategic instrument to maintain territorial autonomy and to promote agroecological land-use as alternatives to agro-industrial expansion. Today more than 64 Peasant Reserve Zones exist contributing to biodiversity conservation and preserving peasant farming practices. However, such approaches presume that conservation authorities recognise local communities' relational conservation approaches, do not stipulate conservation metrics and “acknowledge that all actors bring capabilities, experiences and perspectives that are useful for conservation”.

The broader lesson for the Biodiversity Convention is that inclusion cannot be confined to the institutions designed to promote it. They can open spaces for more equal exchange and bring Indigenous and local knowledge into multilateral processes in innovative ways. But meaningful inclusion depends on what happens beyond these spaces: Whether IPLC can influence decisions, at least those impacting their territories, whether they are financially supported to participate in COPs as well as to manage their territories, and whether they retain this influence across governance levels.

Just right, this year’s World Cities Day (31 October) focuses on “Regenerating the city: Adequate housing for all”. In its World Cities Report 2026, UN-Habitat, the United Nation’s urbanisation agency, states that “access to affordable and adequate housing [is] among the most persistent and complex global challenges of the 21^st century”, highlighting the essential function of housing for social and economic well-being, people’s health, education, mobility and social inclusion. 

The scale of today’s housing crisis, according to UN-Habitat, has reached unprecedented heights. Globally, 44 percent of households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. In many contexts, financialisation, the use of housing as an investment tool by private companies and governments incentivising such practices, deepens unaffordability, leading to rising rents, overcrowding and even homelessness. At present, almost 3.4 billion people worldwide live with some form of housing inadequacy, the highest number in history, while more than one billion residents live in informal settlements, neighbourhoods with unstable houses, inadequate basic services or in which residents have uncertain property or rent status. UN-Habitat research indicates that at least 64 million people were evicted globally between 2003 and 2023 linked to exclusionary urban development processes. 

While the housing crisis is global, challenges are particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa with South Africa being a case in point. The country is amongst the most unequal in the world, with about 86% of its wealth concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest 10% of its population. In urban contexts in which the government has failed to secure affordable ‘formal’ accommodation and large companies and finance institutions have increasing influence on rental and property markets, the spatial inequalities of the past remain deeply embedded. Almost 10 million people live in informal housing conditions (about 24 percent of the country’s urban population) at the cities’ peripheries or in the inner-city, most of them Black, many of them migrants. 

Intended to address these spatial injustices, post-apartheid legislation replaced previous anti-squatting laws, which denied non-White people access to- and residence in the cities. The Prevention of Illegal Eviction (PIE) Act of 1998 decriminalised unlawful occupation and prohibited eviction without due process and alternative accommodation. Currently, the government is preparing its amendment, weakening the state’s obligations towards people facing homelessness after eviction and expanding criminal offences related to the occupation of land. The amendment criminalises civil society organisations who organise with- and provide legal support to affected communities for “inciting” occupation. 

Such an approach reflects a wider tendency of addressing the housing crisis through eviction and policing rather than fulfilling the right to housing guaranteed by the South African Constitution. South Africa’s laws and policies protect people facing eviction and foresee upgrading informal settlements thereby providing basic services and more secure tenure. The existing legal protections are regularly undercut by government’s refusal to resettle evicted communities except when ordered by a court. At times, extra judicial demolitions and evictions are carried out as attempts to stop land occupations or the expansion of informal settlements. Members of government have positioned the residents of informal settlements as enemies and made claims that undocumented migrants are behind the growth of informal settlements. 

What is at stake, is more than housing, in South Africa and elsewhere. Regenerating cities raises profound political questions: who has the right to remain, to belong and to shape the city? What does it take to advance urban social cohesion and (migrant) inclusion? UN-Habitat in its current Strategic Plan highlights the social function of housing and land for all – contrary to understanding housing as a luxury for the few. Beyond sound legal conditions and good policies, as the South African example shows, political will and instruments for rights-based implementation and effective regulation are essential.

Nomzamo Zondo is a human-rights lawyer and director of the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI).

Eva Dick is urban development officer in the Africa and Middle East department of Misereor and associated researcher of the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS).

Jacqueline Wingens is policy officer for urban development at Misereor and associated researcher at IDOS.

The challenge:
• Despite Europe’s significant financial contribu-tion, there is a perception that its influence at the UN is declining as global power shifts. Ear-marked funding still gives it consi¬der¬able say over the UN system, but its influence in formal settings is weakened by its own inconsistencies and by limited outreach to other regions.
• Europe’s interest in the UN may also be fading. Domestic pressures and competing crises push the organisation down the political agenda, as priori¬ties shift towards security, defence and competitiveness.

Priorities for the next SG, as seen from Europe:
• Among numerous agendas, two criteria for prioritisation emerged: (i) relevance to member states’ concerns; (ii) whether the UN can play a distinctive and valuable role.
• For Europe, this points to three areas: (i) peace and security, with the UN contributing to a future peace process and post-war reconstruction in Ukraine; (ii) migration, for which the UN offers a multilateral framework to tackle root causes such as conflict, climate change and global inequality over the long term; (iii) AI governance, where the UN can bring fragmented initiatives together and ensure they complement rather than compete with or duplicate one another.
Recommendations:
• Delivering on these priorities depends not on new mandates or processes – these should be avoided – but on the SG making better use of existing tools, such as their good offices function, their convening power and agenda-setting and their willingness to take political risks. It also depends on adequate financing by member states and on their political support.
• For Europe, the SG should lead with a strategy linked to issues salient to European audiences, act as a bridge-builder between Europe and other regions, and work with Europe’s interests at the UN, including demonstrating how sharing power and supporting a more equitable UN could serve both Europe and other regions in the long term.
 

• Democracy protection stakeholders should shift their attention from suspension-led demo¬cracy support and conditionality aimed at partner governments towards the rules and incentives that run through the private sector. Even after the Omnibus reform’s narrowing scope, firm-facing rules remain in place. They are default-on and run through existing regulatory arrangements, and their potential geopolitical repercussions are smaller in comparison.
• Tender processes are one particular set of firm-facing rules. With the momentum behind the European Commission’s legislative proposal to revise the public procurement directive, corruption-based exclusion rules should be applied against operators linked to state capture in partner countries, as democratic backsliders often use public procurement to consolidate patronage networks.
• Firm-facing regulations also permit a different case to be made: stronger due diligence carries no measurable competitiveness penalty. Companies are not just subjects of regulation. They are also stakeholders with their own interest in transparent procurement and predictable rules. To bolster such a narrative, development cooperation should invest in developing compliance capacity, especially in autocratising states.
 

Key messages:
• Just conservation: Conservation policies that contribute to environmental justice have the greatest potential to achieve long-term, sustainable and legitimate conservation outcomes for people and the planet.
• Land rights-based conservation: Land rights reconfigure power relations and are a key pre¬requisite for environmental justice. Collective land titles such as Colombia’s Peasant Reserve Zones (ZRCs) are a promising instrument.
• Towards distributive justice by reforming conservation finance: IP&LCs should benefit more directly from forest, climate and biodiversity funding and should have a say in how money is spent in their communities. IP&LC-led funds and designated funding windows for IP&LCs are promising options.
• Basic Income for Nature and Climate (BINC): We suggest BINC as a promising measure to improve the livelihoods of IP&LCs and to overcome the transactional logic of market-based instruments. BINC compensates for past environmental injustices and enables recipients to make land-use decisions that are less influenced by precarity and market forces.
 
Professor Dr Fernanda Figueroa currently works at the Facultad de Ciencias, Departamento de Ecología y Recursos Naturales, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Dr Lasse Loft is a senior scientist at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in Müncheberg, Germany.
Professor Dr Maano Ramutsindela is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Cape Town and the UP-UCT Future Africa Research Chair in Sustainability Transformations at the University of Pretoria and the University of Cape Town, South Africa. 
Georg Buchholz is team leader of the International Forest Policy sectoral project at GIZ, Germany.
Dr Juan Sebastián Vélez Triana is a postdoctoral researcher with the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS / UCLouvain, Belgium, and a research associate at the Centre for Alternatives to Development (CEALDES), Colombia. 
Professor Dr Florian Dünckmann heads the Cultural Geography Research Group in the Department of Geography at Kiel University, Germany.
Dr Ina Lehmann is assistant professor of Governance of Global Biodiversity at the Environmental Policy Analysis section at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Professor Dr Silja Klepp is professor of Human Geography at Kiel University, Germany.
Dennis Schüpf is a PhD student in the Department of Geography, University of Bonn, Germany.
Anne Rose Atkins is a doctoral candidate in the Social Geography of Coastal and Marine Areas working group at the Geography Department of Kiel University, Germany.
Dumisani Chirambo is the founder of Seeds of Opportunity in Malawi. 
Felice Diekel is a PhD candidate at the Department of Civil Engineering & Management at the University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands.
Salome Gikonyo is part of the coordination team of the EnJust Network for Environmental Justice, Germany. 
Dr Rina Mardiana is a lecturer in the Human Geography Study Program, Faculty of Social Sciences and Human Ecology, at IPB University in Bogor, Indonesia.
Dr Adnan Mirhanoğlu is an F.R.S.-FNRS postdoctoral researcher at the Centre d’Études de la Coopération Internationale et du Développement (CECID), Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.  
Kim Nierobisch is part of the coordination team of the EnJust Network for Environmental Justice, Germany. 
Kelly Peña is a PhD student at the Institute of Geography, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany.
Professor Dr Prakash C. Tiwari works at the Centre for Ecology Development and Research in Dehradun, India.