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.
 

Dr Tobias Zumbraegel is a senior researcher at the University of Heidelberg and sustainability consultant at Momentum Novum GmbH. 

Key policy messages

• Planned relocation for communities in urban settings requires long-term planning for services such as new public transportation connections, schools, secure land tenure and health facilities.
• Measures should be taken to build institutional trust with urban com­munities, who may lack the traditional mechanisms of chiefly or customary representa­tion that is present in rural settings.
• Community identity is often strong and can be a starting point for policy-makers and communities to identify sustainable options for relocation.

Dr Anawaite Matadradra is a Lecturer at the University of the South Pacific.
Dr Sevanaia Sakai is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the South Pacific.
Unaisi Raileqe is a Project Officer at the Pacific Centre for Peacebuilding.
Dr Timothy Fadgen is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland.

Dr Jürgen Karl Zattler is a distinguished non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC and a non-resident research fellow at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) in Bonn. Until October 2023, he was Director General at the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Prior to that, he served as the Executive Director representing Germany at the World Bank.

The Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank open in Bangkok today, at a time when financing sustainable development faces mounting pressure from geopolitical tensions, worsening debt crises, and declining official development assistance. With developing countries facing an estimated annual financing gap of $4 trillion to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, stronger cooperation between multilateral and national development banks is more critical than ever.

The Compromiso de Sevilla, adopted at the 4^th International Conference on Financing for Development in Sevilla in 2025, underscored the importance of national development banks (banks) in promoting sustainable development, for example by channelling long-term and affordable financing to renewable energy, high-value priority sectors or small and medium enterprises, and called on development partners (partners) to increase their support for the banks. The question is then how partners, including multilateral development banks such as the World Bank, can best respond to that call. 

Our recent research takes up that question by looking at the Development Bank Ghana (DBG) and the Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN), two relatively new African development banks established with substantial support from partners, including the World Bank, KfW, the European Investment Bank, Agence Française de Développement, and the African Development Bank. We found that partners can reinforce the banks’ capacity by providing financing and technical assistance while strengthening institutional independence (the ability to pursue operations and their mandate free from political interference) and respecting national ownership (locally determined development priorities). We would like to highlight three main findings that stand out.    

First, partners provide the banks with long-term, affordable capital, allowing them to invest in national sustainable development. Just as important, reputable international partners can also lend credibility, giving other stakeholders the confidence to invest in or lend to the banks. Partners can also support domestic resource mobilisation efforts, such as bond issuance, through guarantees and technical assistance, reducing the banks’ reliance on external financing. In this way, partners help the banks diversify their funding sources and strengthen their financial autonomy.  

Second, engagement with partners can also improve the banks’ institutional independence. For DBG and DBN, partners helped embed mandates for wholesale lending and provisions for institutional independence from the start. Channelling funds to final beneficiaries through local commercial financial institutions, so-called participating financial institutions, shields lending decisions from political interference, safeguarding the banks’ institutional independence. The experience of both banks also highlights the importance of selective alignment, where engagement with partners is based on their ability to advance nationally owned development priorities. This approach serves as a safeguard against subservience, which previous research has flagged as a risk to collaboration between multilateral and national development banks. 

Third, technical assistance and capacity building are core elements of an impactful partnership.  Both banks have received technical support in areas including risk management, environmental, social, and governance practices, green finance, and lending that advances gender equality.  This support is particularly valuable for relatively new institutions that draw staff from commercial banks, as it helps them adapt to a development banking mandate and build the institutional mindset and capacity needed to balance financial sustainability with development impact.

These lessons – investing in institutional capacity building alongside financing, while aligning assistance with national priorities – offer practical ways for partners to respond to the call to support national development banks in reaching their full potential. Partners need to do more than provide financing to effectively support the banks in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals. They also need to provide support that builds strong and independent national institutions that can mobilise additional funds from capital markets (including domestic savings) to scale up their activities. Our findings suggest that successful partnerships should be measured by both the financial and institutional capacity of the banks to invest in sustainable development at scale. This week’s Annual Meetings should explore ways to advance international cooperation that ensures national development banks are better capitalised and capable of implementing nationally owned development priorities with greater independence and at a larger scale.