Global development policy is going through an upheaval following the cuts in ODA (Official Development Assistance) by leading donors and the knock-on effects of US withdrawal from international institutions and its own pivot to national interests. The longstanding policy norms such as framing development as a shared global endeavour, combining moral and strategic redistribution and favouring multilateral coordination are eroding.
G7 and G20 working groups are now actively discussing the global development ‘architecture’. The recent G7 Development Ministers’ Chair’s Summary (October 2025)1 is unusually explicit on the future of the global development architecture: ministers call for reform of the “international aid architecture” to “reduce fragmentation and enhance coherence, effectiveness and impact,” and stress that reform must “go beyond cost-cutting” to include “targeted structural realignment, mandate streamlining, and enhanced efficiency”. This is not technical language. It sounds like a political signal that the G7 intends to reshape how development cooperation is organised, coordinated and justified. The G20’s July 2025 development ministerial declaration2 implied major new and sustained collective financing mechanisms towards universal social protection as well as the G20 working collectively on illicit financial flows.
In this context, and as the UK and the EU both redefine their own development role amid major fiscal pressures and a shift towards a more geopolitical context, understanding competing global visions can inform how the UK and the EU position themselves within these emerging architecture debates. The key question for the UK and EU is do they want to be norm-makers or norm-takers in the evolution of the global development architecture? In this brief, we ask what that development architecture might look like in 2030. We see four stylised visions emerging in competition. Which is most likely to prevail? How do the UK and EU want to shape this debate?
There is scope for the UK and the EU to work together on this in the “Common Understanding”3 adopted alongside the May 2025 UK-EU Security and Defence Partnership4 which commits the parties to a “regular dialogue in the area of development cooperation”, and the Security and Defence Partnership itself sets out adjacent areas with clear development interfaces including coordination in multilateral fora supported by new UK-EU dialogue mechanisms. As they do this, the UK and the EU need to see the big picture and the stakes at play over the longer term.
Introduction
It’s 2030. President JD Vance is US president. Global politics is realigning around technology and resources. All countries — rich and poor — are dealing with major social upheaval as the impacts of AI on work, economies, lifestyles and politics becomes more evident. And it’s getting hotter. We ask: What does the global development architecture look like in this world five years from now?
What do we mean by the ‘global development architecture’? This refers to the broader architecture of actors, norms, instruments and institutions that mobilise and coordinate resources, knowledge and political support for sustainable development goals. Within this system, Official Development Assistance (ODA) is a core financial instrument, primarily provided by OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Development Assistance Committee members; it functions alongside other modalities such as South–South cooperation, climate finance, philanthropic aid and private-sector engagement.
The development cooperation system emerged in the post-World War II period, initially shaped by Cold War logics and donor-driven priorities. Since the mid-2010s, consensus has frayed under the pressures of geopolitical rivalry, domestic politicisation of aid, and South–South cooperation providers advancing alternative development models, prompting a shift towards more fragmented and contested norms.
Even in 2025 we can see a set of rival visions emerging and vying influence on how the global development architecture should look in the years ahead.5 There is a ‘Nationalist Conditionality’ vision of transactional bilateralism under the ‘New Washington Dissensus’6;there is a functionalist vision of ‘Strategic Multilateralism’ — a narrower, stability-oriented multilateralism; there is a ‘Pluralist Development Cooperation’ vision of like-minded countries working through coalitions to design, fund, and implement cooperation, alongside or outside traditional donors.7 Finally, there is a ‘Global Solidarity 2.0’ vision of revived collective provision of global public goods with North and Southern co-leadership.
What follows takes those four visions as political projects. We ask: what if one of them becomes dominant or ‘wins’? What does the development architecture actually look like in 2030 if one becomes institutionally, financially and normatively dominant? We set out four possible worlds in 2030. Each world based on one ‘vision’ that has become dominant.
Scenario 1. Aid Retrenchment & Nationalist Conditionality wins
By 2030, development cooperation has been absorbed into foreign, interior, and trade / investment policy. This is the ’nationalist conditionality’ regime. In that regime, assistance becomes transactional, bilateral and ideological. Climate, gender and rights are dropped. Border control and alignment with the donor’s political preferences are prioritised.
This is the world in which the Trump-era template became the norm across the Atlantic system and then spreads. In 2025, the US administration proposed dismantling USAID, folding its functions into the State Department, cutting support to UN agencies, slashing UN peacekeeping and UNICEF, and making cooperation conditional on migration control and political alignment. The same administration argued that the IMF and World Bank should “stick to core mandates”, not climate or gender agendas, and threatened to withhold funds from any organisation that did not comply. By 2030, under continuing fiscal austerity and anti-migration politics in Europe, allies copy it.
ODA budgets fall sharply. What remains is tightly tied to bilateral compacts. Each compact reads like a contract: money in exchange for stopping migrants; money in exchange for alignment with the donor’s geopolitical stance on a rival power; money in exchange for privileged access to minerals, ports or airspace. This reflects ’transactionalism of aid’ and ’ideological vetting’ within the New Washington Dissensus.
Multilateral bodies are bypassed wherever possible. Donors claim that UN agencies are inefficient, ideologically hostile and China dominated. Cuts first floated in 2025 to multilateral contributions to UN agencies, climate funds and multilateral health bodies become permanent. Global health assistance survives, but only as part of a ’global biosecurity’ agenda framed as keeping pathogens out of rich countries rather than building universal health systems. Civil society in low- and middle-income countries now often negotiates directly with private philanthropies or city/regional governments in the North, because national governments fear that accepting funds tied to rights language will trigger sanctions or visa restrictions.
The Washington Consensus of the 1990s had conditionality on macroeconomic reform. The New Washington Dissensus of the 2030s has conditionality on ideology and border enforcement. This is more than a budget cut. It means solidarity is no longer seen as legitimate and multilateralism is no longer seen as necessary.
In this world, development cooperation survives mainly as a coercive tool used by powerful states to secure compliance from weaker ones. The poorest and most fragile states, which cannot bargain, are the most exposed. Middle income states play donors off against one another or pivot to South-South finance. Global problems such as climate adaptation, antimicrobial resistance and sovereign debt workouts receive ad hoc attention at moments of crisis but lack any predictable funding channel.
This scenario delivers clarity of purpose for nationalist governments in donor states. It also accelerates the breakdown of any shared global development project.
Scenario 2. Strategic or functionalist multilateralism wins
By 2030, the aid system still exists, but it is thin, security and migration oriented, and defensive. This ’strategic multilateralism’ is an arrangement in which coalitions of states defend or adapt multilateral institutions under pressure, but with more limited ambition. That world has already arrived.
Trump-era pressure on multilateral bodies to narrow their mandates, avoid ’mission creep’ on climate and gender, and prioritise what Washington calls ‘core functions’ did not end with Trump. In 2025, senior US officials said the IMF and World Bank should focus on stabilisation, crisis response and hard infrastructure, and avoid broad social or climate agendas. European governments initially resisted, but fiscal constraints, migration pressures and domestic politics pushed them in the same direction. By the early 2030s, the consensus among G7 finance ministries is that multilateral cooperation is acceptable as long as it supports border control, macroeconomic stability and interruption of state failure.
The multilateral development banks are still central in 2030, but they act more like macro-stability insurers and catalytic capital mobilsers than like broad development agencies. The Multilateral Development Banks mobilise private capital and build pipelines, including upstream preparation, structuring, and transaction management. They crowd in private finance rather than act as traditional project implementers.
Country operations focus on debt restructuring packages tied to governance benchmarks, climate adaptation projects that protect insured assets, targeted food security programmes in fragile regions that might spill conflict across borders, and migration management compacts on Europe’s periphery. This matches the 2025 observation that strategic multilateralism places priority on stability, risk containment and selected global public goods, rather than on universal poverty reduction or structural transformation.
Concessional resources are rationed to countries seen as geostrategic or fragile. Grants and very soft loans go mainly to Sahel-border states, small island states with relocation crises, and middle-income transit states that agree to tighten migration routes. Development cooperation is explicitly linked to migration control, border externalisation and geopolitical alignment.
Coordination sits with ad hoc ’Contact Groups’ of likeminded donors plus a few invited partners rather than with universal UN bodies. The G7 Development Ministers’ meeting format survives and becomes a steering group for Multilateral Development Bank reform, using language first set out in 2025 about “targeted structural realignment, mandate streamlining and enhanced efficiency” and “reducing fragmentation”. The result is a club-led multilateralism. It is still multilateral, but it is selective, defensive and more securitised.
Civil society has less access than in the 2010s. In addition, the label of ’civil society’ activities has for many years been used by autocratic regimes to pursue their own agendas. The normative register is technocratic and security driven. The Sustainable Development Goals are treated as historical branding — not least because the international community was unable to update the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals in 2030. Climate is framed as adaptation and resilience, not mitigation justice. Health is framed as pandemic containment and surveillance, not universal health coverage. This reflects the narrowing of ambition and donor self-interest.
Winners in this world include finance ministries, Multilateral Development Bank executives and interior ministries. Losers include parts of the classic aid community whose legitimacy was already in crisis by 2025, when solidarity claims had weakened and development cooperation was being reframed as a tool for migration deterrence and economic diplomacy.
Scenario 3. Pluralist development cooperation wins
By 2030, there is no single ‘system’. There are dozens of partially overlapping regimes. This is ‘pluralist development cooperation’ which is associated with South-South partnerships (a dominant Chinese approach that differs from those of India, Morocco, South Africa, and others), horizontal rhetoric, and flexible coalitions rather than a single centre. The term “likeminded internationalism” is used to capture coalitions of countries that work together outside universal bodies, often on specific agendas like minerals, supply chains or digital infrastructure. By 2030 this has become normal.
Regional development banks, sovereign wealth funds, Gulf climate funds, the New Development Bank, ASEAN infrastructure vehicles, African continental initiatives, Mercosur resilience funds, and a series of ’critical minerals partnerships’ operate in parallel. Each has its own rules. Each claims to offer partnership instead of conditionality. Recipient governments choose between them, or combine them — ’aid shopping’ is the new normal. Western ODA is one option among many, not the default. Already in 2025 many low- and middle-income countries have greater bargaining power because they can tap Chinese, Gulf or regional sources of finance, which weakens the leverage of OECD donors.
A typical deal in 2030 is triangular. For example, a Southern regional bank finances grid upgrades. A Gulf climate fund covers insurance against extreme weather losses. A Northern export credit agency funds AI-enabled border surveillance in exchange for a migration control accord. The UN is informed after the fact, if at all.
The upside is speed and custom fit. Governments can pick coalitions that align with their development narrative, for example industrial upgrading in critical minerals or agri-processing, which the G7 itself in 2025 already framed as an explicit part of “partnerships for economic prosperity” with countries such as Indonesia, Peru and South Africa. Transactions stress “value addition at home”, which G7 ministers in 2025 also highlighted in relation to formalising artisanal mining, skills development and retaining value locally.
The downside is fragmentation. There is no shared debt protocol. Environmental and social safeguards vary — often showing a tendency to race-to-the-bottom. Reporting is opaque. Civil society complains that extractive deals are being rebranded as ’horizontal partnership’ but still reproduce asymmetric power. In short, pluralist cooperation is not free of geopolitics.
By 2030, this pluralist order has weakened any hope of a single narrative about sustainable development. There is no agreed definition of legitimate conditionality. There is no universal poverty agenda. Instead, there is a competitive market in offers. Geopolitical non-alignment is monetised. Clients say to donors: “match what Beijing/Gulf/Brussels is offering, or we walk.” This pluralist competition constrains overt coercion by any one bloc, which many Southern governments welcome, but it also erodes collective capacity to provide global public goods at scale.
In short, pluralist cooperation delivers autonomy and bargaining space for many governments, especially middle-income reformers and resource exporters. It also produces system-level incoherence by the coexistence of multiple regimes, creates unpredictability and makes coordination harder to sustain.
Scenario 4. Global solidarity 2.0 wins
By 2030, development cooperation has been politically reframed as a matter of shared security and shared prosperity, not charity. This vision has a revitalised commitment to development as a global public good, with leadership from both North and South. Countries argue that climate stability, pandemic preparedness, antimicrobial resistance, financial contagion and food system resilience are indivisible. The political line is: “if one state fails, all pay”.
The G7, some more EU member states, the African Union Commission, Brazil, Indonesia and India agree a Compact for Global Public Goods in 2029 — South Africa is rightly claiming its intellectual role in this approach, based on its leadership of the G20 in 2025. The Compact merges pledges on climate adaptation finance, global health security, and debt relief for states in or near default. This follows the call in 2025 for reform that “goes beyond cost-cutting” and instead focuses on mandate clarity, institutional performance and coherence across funders. The OECD Development Assistance Committee is no longer the arbiter of who counts as a donor. Instead, an expanded forum recognises Gulf funds, China’s policy banks, and the New Development Bank as formal contributors to global goods finance. This addresses a legitimacy problem. They note that traditional ODA claims of moral obligation have lost credibility, and that Southern actors demand voice and co-leadership.
The centrepiece is a Global Public Goods Facility. The idea of a pooled instrument for global public goods with shared governance between North and South had already circulated in policy debate in 2025. By 2030, this becomes operational. All countries pay in, based on income and carbon profile. All countries can receive, based on exposure to cross-border risk. This breaks the binary of ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’, which was already eroding as middle income countries gained bargaining power and alternative lenders.
Concessional finance grows again, but it is tightly earmarked to collective goods. Public budgets in G7 countries still face pressure, yet parliaments accept contributions to pandemic surveillance and green infrastructure abroad on national interest grounds. This resonates with the argument that the only politically durable way to revive solidarity is to redefine it as mutual protection rather than one-way redistribution.
Institutionally, the United Nations regains some convening authority. A new North South Commission, modelled self-consciously on the Brandt Commission of the early 1980s8, is created in 2028 to mediate disputes over loss-and-damage funding, debt-for-climate swaps and intellectual property for health technologies. The idea of reviving such a Commission already appears in 2025 discussions as a way to restore legitimacy and create a shared forum in a fractured system.
This world in 2030 is more solidaristic in rhetoric and somewhat more redistributive in practice. It relies on multilateral arrangements with stronger Southern co-ownership, rather than on the classic post-Cold War model in which OECD donors defined the rules and others complied.
Frictions persist. China and India expect equal agenda-setting rights and resist Western human rights conditionality. Climate-vulnerable states argue that transfers are still too small. But the norm that global risks require global financing is dominant. The Sustainable Development Goals no longer frame debate, yet their concerns have been partially absorbed into the Global Public Goods mandate around climate, health and systemic resilience.
What to take away in 2025 to shape 2030?
Is this all too far-fetched? All four scenarios are already latent in 2025 and the policy debate is on the G7 and G20 agendas. Already the global development system is no longer governed by a single consensus but instead features several competing regimes that coexist and sometime collide. Any of the four futures is plausible. What happens at the G7 and G20 in the next few years could decide what the system looks like in ten years’ time. The UK and EU need to decide which vision is desirable whilst being politically plausible across a range of actors. Indeed, for the UK and the EU, the tension between strategic multilateralism and nationalist conditionality is already visible. Whether the UK and EU leans toward securitised cooperation, pluralist partnerships, or renewed global solidarity will depend on how they reconcile their national security priorities with their stated commitment to poverty reduction and global public goods.
Typical challenges in the past included countries failing to live up to their commitments and a lack of mutual trust between governments, which prevented progress toward sustainable development. The new problem is that the fundamental assumptions of global sustainable development are no longer shared — indeed, these ideas are increasingly being aggressively challenged by right-wing populist political forces.
These futures suggest a set of policy choices for the UK Government and the EU which may determine if they become norm-makers. Specifically, whether together they lead on reforming multilateralism, to embrace pluralist partnerships that empower local actors, or retrench toward transactional bilateralism.
These decisions in the coming years will help determine whether the UK and EU remain shaping forces in the global development architecture and norm-makers or are forced to adapt to policy norms shaped by others and become norm-takers.
1. Global Affairs Canada (2025) ‘G7 Development Ministers’ Chair’s Summary – Fostering partnerships for economic prosperity’, statement, 21 October 2025. Ottawa: Government of Canada. Available at: https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2025/10/g7-development-ministers-chairs-summary–fostering-partnerships-for-economic-prosperity.html
2. G20 Development Ministers (2025) ‘G20 Skukuza Development Ministerial Declaration’, declaration, 25 July 2025. Skukuza, South Africa: G20 South Africa Presidency. Available at: https://g20.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2025-Final-Draft-G20-Skukuza-Development-Ministerial-Declaration.pdf
3. European Commission and HM Government (2025) ‘Common Understanding on a renewed agenda for European Union – United Kingdom cooperation’, UK–EU Summit outcome document, 19 May 2025. London: Cabinet Office. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ukeu-summit-key-documentation/uk-eu-summit-common-understanding-html
4. European Union and HM Government (2025) ‘Security and Defence Partnership between the European Union and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’, UK–EU Summit outcome document, 19 May 2025. London: Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and Ministry of Defence. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-eu-security-and-defence-partnership
5. Klingebiel, S. and Sumner, A. (2025) ‘Four futures for a global development cooperation system in flux: policy at the intersection of geopolitics, norm contestation and institutional shift’, IDOS Policy Brief 11/2025. Bonn: German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS). DOI: 10.23661/ipb11.2025. Available at: https://www.idos-research.de/policy-brief/article/four-futures-for-a-global-development-cooperation-system-in-flux/
6. Sumner, A. and Klingebiel, S. (2025) ‘The New Washington Dissensus: Trump’s Five Principles for Global Development Policy’, blog post, 15 April 2025. Washington, DC: Center for Global Development. Available at: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/new-washington-dissensus-trumps-five-principles-global-development-policy
7. Ishmael, L., Klingebiel, S. and Sumner, A. (2025) ‘In search of a Plan B: The Future of Global Development Lies in “Like-Minded Internationalism”’, GP Opinion blog post, 22 May 2025. Global Policy Journal. Available at: https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/22/05/2025/search-plan-b-future-global-development-lies-minded-internationalism
8. Sumner, A., Klingebiel, S. and Yusuf, A.A. (2025) ‘Rebuilding Legitimacy for Global Governance: The Case for a New Independent Commission’, GP Opinion blog post, 3 June 2025. Global Policy Journal. Available at: https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/03/06/2025/rebuilding-legitimacy-global-governance-case-new-independent-commission
