As leading donors draw back from their aid commitments, align their policy more explicitly with national and commercial interests and radically cut their funding, should we expect a new paradigm for development cooperation, including humanitarian policy, and if so, what form might this take? How important is the established template for development cooperation and humanitarian assistance, and how will governments across different regions navigate these changes?

Annalisa Prizzon, Editor-in-Chief, Development Policy Review; and Principal Research Fellow, ODI Global asked leading stellar scholars to answer these (and other) questions in the newly published joint special issue of two of ODI Global’s journals – Development Policy Review and Disasters. The articles in this issue explore what the changing aid landscape might mean for recipient countries in the Global South, Western donors themselves, and the development and humanitarian community.

You can read the whole of this joint special issue of Development Policy Review and Disasters, and Annalisa highlights the contributions, including Matthew Foley’s compelling introduction to the special issue, brilliantly summarising the contributions.

All the articles are free to read for the next three months.

🔹 Carlos Lopes “When Empathy Fades: The Collapse of Humanitarian Responsibility in a Structurally Broken World”
🔹 Emma Mawdsley Glenn Banks Chloe S.Regina Scheyvens John Overton “Taking (anti-)‘woke’ seriously: the future of development cooperation and humanitarian
🔹 Meg Taylor, DBE, Soli Middleby and Suli Vunibola “Aid in the Age of Amazon: Imperial Logics, Pacific Resistance and an Alternate Paradigm”
🔹 Andrea Ordóñez Llanos “Different Worlds, Different Cooperation Models”
🔹 Juliano Fiori “A post-social question”
🔹 Yuen Yuen Ang “Why the Polycrisis can also be a Polytunity”
🔹 Jiajun Xu “Navigating Development Cooperation for Structural Transformation“
🔹 Basma Taysir El Doukhi “Reclaiming Power and Partnerships in the Wake of Donor Retraction through South–South Partnership”
🔹 Samir Elhawary “Humanitarian reform in 2025: why this time has to be different”
🔹 Mohamed Hassan Mohamud “Lack of accountability, not budget cuts, is the real humanitarian crisis”
🔹 Sherine McCarthy, PhD “The unbearable lightness of humanitarian reform: Reflections on calls for change in the sector”
🔹 Jayati Ghosh “Can the end of ‘foreign aid’ be the beginning of global public investment?”
🔹 André de Mello e Souza “The Prospects for International Development Cooperation in Times of Geopolitical Conflict and Resource Scarcity”
🔹 Ishac Diwan “What would it take for private capital to replace ODA?”