What should a new era of development cooperation look like? How can we move from vision to action? And how can we create more inclusive and equitable partnerships? In today’s world, these questions have become ever more pressing and have been the focus of many global conversations between actors from the global South and the global North.
Concrete action needed
During May, two major conferences took place along with multiple related events timed to coincide with these conversations, and IDS and Southern Voice collaborated closely on both. The critical point is whether these conversations lead not only to reflection but to the concrete actions needed to build a development cooperation system that is fit for purpose for today’s contexts. An approach to global partnership that is more responsive to countries’ priorities, more inclusive in its governance, and better equipped to improve the lives of those who need it most.
The OECD’s Future of Development Cooperation conference in Paris, and the Global Partnerships Conference in London a week later, hosted participants from around the world to ‘build new international coalitions to tackle shared challenges’, including from the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition.
Valuable collaboration and discussion
Many events organised alongside the conferences, included an informal workshop on the ‘Changing context of development cooperation’ convened by IDOS, Germany, the British Academy and FCDO’s launch of Global Research and Technology Development, and the Canadian High Commission hosted Equality Fund announcing support from Canada, the UK and Germany.
Aside from the importance of the topics under discussion, the chance for collaborators and partners to come together in person to think through the potential for actions bringing about systemic transformation was really timely and valuable.
Ambition to shift power relations
Both the OECD and UK conferences were impressive in terms of their ambitions to go beyond talking shops and to generate actions underpinned by accountability. They made welcome efforts not only to include, but also to give space to a diverse array of voices and perspectives from around the world. This was important given the emphasis of the conferences on shifting power relations and on de-centring development in ways that promote and demonstrate the agency of Global South actors.
In Paris, attention was given to ‘bold ideas for international co-operation in a fragmenting world’. We both had the privilege to moderate roundtables on ‘Identifying areas of convergence on purposes of international development co-operation’ and ‘Maximising impact and managing trade-offs in decision-making’. These discussions had been partly informed by a briefing that IDS had contributed in advance and by a series of regional roundtables convened by Southern Voice in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
In London, Southern Voice, OECD and IDS co-hosted a side event on ‘Shifting the Power: Global South Perspectives on Future Purposes of Development Cooperation and New Partnership Approaches’. It featured a multi-perspective panel, which brought together speakers from Guinea, Zambia, and Bangladesh, alongside representatives from global and national development institutions and initiatives.
Integrating global South perspectives
The conversation invited participants to propose practical policies and actions to better integrate global South perspectives into development cooperation. Several examples of policies and initiatives already being implemented at the national and international levels to address long-standing power imbalances were presented, alongside potential pathways for translating shared aspirations into concrete action.
A clear message from the global South representatives was the need to better align development cooperation with national development priorities and plans, which have already included the buying of local actors, enabling more coherent partnerships and more effective collective action.
Before the conferences, we reflected on the need to recentre the global development agenda, and why bringing together a diversity of voices and views is so important. The conferences highlighted areas where more focus is needed. Clearly, the seriously constrained financial environment for ODA will make practical actions ever harder to pursue, a point that was made multiple times in Paris and London.
The mantra of ‘doing more with less’ is, however, an unrealistic proposition when it comes, for example, to ensuring partnerships are truly underpinned by equity. When linking development with peace and security, or supporting governmental and non-governmental actors to work together in fragile or conflict-affected contexts, investment is urgently needed to address such multiple, intersecting challenges.
Lessons to takeaway
Many of the conversations we heard were extremely rich and necessary and we will continue to reflect on them in other spaces, including the upcoming Hamburg Sustainability conference; but here are a few takeaways from last month:
Danger of losing focus on immediacy of need
The disruptive geopolitical context globally means that conferences such as those in Paris and London focused on the overarching structures within the development architecture. Whilst this is needed, there is a danger in losing focus on the immediacy of people’s needs, lives and livelihoods alongside strategies to achieve more sustainable development.
Urgent need for clarity on continued role for humanitarian aid
There is an urgent need for clarity on the continued role for humanitarian aid given declining ODA funding, alongside the important question of how development cooperation can put people’s needs at the centre of future cooperation. As our OECD briefing indicated, many actors in the global South are clear that their priorities need to be at the heart of agenda setting processes, yet many of the global and multi-lateral institutional mechanisms currently in place are ill-equipped to make this happen.
Multiple actors need to work together to create a shared agenda
There is a great deal of emphasis on government-to-government partnerships (for example through ‘country-led development’ and ‘localisation’), but there is less explicit recognition that in any national context there are multiple actors who need to work together to create a shared agenda. This is often very difficult, contentious and even conflictual, and may require different kinds of cooperation. Increasingly this involves South-South cooperation, but also there may at times be value of facilitation through long-standing partnerships between global South and global North.
Societal approaches needed as much as technical solutions
Technical solutions are frequently posed as the answer to various development challenges. These are important, but societal approaches will be equally needed, ensuring people’s realities are central to the development and implementation of those technical solutions. The current Ebola outbreak illustrates this need very clearly.
AI concerns must be understood
There is often excitement at conferences over the potentials that AI can offer (and indeed in London there was significant presence of AI and tech initiatives sharing evidence of their value). However, genuine concerns were raised frequently during the debates that the data which AI draws on has been generated by a relatively small portion of the world’s population. For-profit companies, keen on bringing technical solutions, may not see the immediate or even long-term benefit of a more inclusive approach which will involve capacity strengthening of institutions, and technologies, within Low- and Middle-Income countries.
Shifting the power talk is important but practical action needed
Shifting the power is important to talk about, but practical action when those with power are reluctant to move towards redistributing it isn’t easy. In our London side event, one speaker said of their (multilateral) organisation that if real systemic change was going to be achieved, then “We need to get out of the way”. How many powerful actors who still want to have control over resources and decision-making are willing even to say this, never mind doing it? It wasn’t surprising to hear the frequent call for ‘mindset change’ at both conferences.
Finally, from the perspective of a research institution and a global South network of think tanks, it would be good to have more emphasis on conferences such as this on the importance of evidence. They also need to engage with, and value, diverse sources of critical, contextual knowledge and innovation as a means of supporting learning and adaptation. This is going to be vital as we experience ever-growing uncertainty in our shared world.