GLOBAL PUBLIC INVESTMENT: Five paradigm shifts for a new era of aid

Publisher:  JLI  with Funding and support from ICSS, GFAN, PITCH-FSP and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands.

“While there is much to applaud about development progress, there is also much of concern, not least with regard to widening inequality and threats to our environment. With the advent of the Sustainable Development Goals, however, there is a bold global framework through which to address common challenges and build a coherent response.

An area where thinking and practice in the international development sector will need to evolve is in its approach to “aid”. With worrying signs of growing nationalism in many countries, we need to strengthen our discourse of solidarity and shared responsibility. The changing nature of geopolitics is conducive to doing that as the voices of the Global South continue to strengthen in the international arena.

This is the context in which this report proposes a new vision for development co-operation. Building on the best of “aid”, it suggests a series of paradigm shifts to modernise our approach. Those shifts include raising ambitions from the level of the MDGs to that of the more comprehensive SDGs; emphasising the unique value of concessional international public finance as a complement to other sources of development finance; recognising the shifting geography of development co-operation to which all the world’s countries now contribute one way or another, and suggesting governance arrangements to reflect that. We should also insist on a new narrative to replace the old-fashioned and misleading language of “donors” and “aid”. “