By Robert O'Neill
Global development is facing a pivotal moment: shrinking foreign aid, geopolitical instability, economic uncertainty, and rising risks of recession. At the same time, urgent challenges remain—from investing in human development, education, and technology to advancing inclusive growth, innovative development finance, and effective global governance in a multipolar world.
Meeting these challenges with fewer resources will require bold new ideas. We asked our faculty affiliates to share fresh thinking on the biggest issues shaping international development and how to address them.
Development Reimagined: Pathways to a Thriving World is a collection of essays, launched alongside CID's 2026 Global Empowerment Meeting, which serves as a resource for policymakers, academics, and leaders across sectors navigating a new era of global development.
Education Redux: At a Global Scale
There are over two billion children under the age of 18 in the world. Nearly half of them cannot read and understand a simple text by age ten. And the situation is getting worse: OECD countries have seen declining PISA scores over the past two decades, with no country bucking the trend. Even as spending on education has risen, educational productivity—student learning per dollar invested—has fallen. If we want our children to reach their potential, we need to fundamentally rethink how we educate them.
That rethinking starts with a more ambitious goal—one that draws inspiration from how education began: a bespoke master-apprentice model tailored to each individual's lifelong learning. The challenge is how to achieve this at a global scale, and equitably. To get there, argue Asim I. Khwaja and Emiliana Vegas, we need to reconsider how we conceive of, and provide, education. Education should not be reduced to a sequence of classrooms and standardized exams stretching from kindergarten to college. It is, at its best, a dynamic and lifelong process of discovering, nurturing, and activating human potential. Educational ecosystems should be designed to ensure that every individual—regardless of geography or social circumstance—can realize their full potential and become an active participant in the economy and in civic life. At its core, this vision rests on the recognition that innate talent is multidimensional.
Every child is born with a unique combination of capacities—cognitive, creative, emotional, psychological, and social. These extend well beyond conventional academic abilities such as reading, mathematics, and science to include qualities such as grit, resilience, empathy, collaboration, curiosity, and interpersonal intelligence. Recognizing this diversity challenges the narrower definitions of intelligence that have dominated education for much of the past century.
Nurturing young children and their caregivers
It is estimated that there are 250 million children living in low- and middle- income countries who are unable to meet their developmental milestones in the first five years of life, Aisha K. Yousafzai reminds us.
But realizing young children’s potential is dependent upon addressing barriers to caregiving pathways and meeting the needs of both young children and the constellation of caregivers in their world.
Taking smart dual-generation investments forward to help young children and their caregivers flourish will require a shared policy vision on children and care. Future programs should be developed to respond to both local context and the needs of young children and their caregivers. Finally, promising emerging models must evaluate impacts on both generations.
The service sector as an engine of economic development
Historically, Dani Rodrik argues, the pathway to better, more productive jobs was industrialization. But with manufacturing industries no longer the labor-absorbing sectors they once were, the bulk of better jobs will have to be generated in the service sector.
“This creates a significant challenge since most services in developing countries are highly unproductive and informal. To make things worse, governments are not used to thinking of their service sectors as a growth engine. Growth policies—whether they relate to research and development, governance, regulation, or industrial policies—typically target large manufacturing firms that compete in world markets,” Rodrik writes.
“Enhancing productivity and employment simultaneously in labor-intensive service sectors is a difficult task, but one that governments will have to learn how to do. The requisite policies will have many of the same features of “modern industrial policy:" close, iterative collaboration with firms and entrepreneurs designed to remove obstacles to the enhancement of their productive capabilities in return for soft conditionality on job creation.”
Workforce development for the developing world
The future we envision is one in which individuals in developing countries enter the labor market with the skills they need to obtain good jobs. For most individuals in developing countries, and for the foreseeable future, that transition will involve moving directly from secondary school into work. Making that transition as successful as possible requires rethinking our approach to workforce development, Gordon Hanson maintains.
“We need to target training in substantive occupational skills in demand by employers, help individuals develop the soft skills they need to excel in the workplace, be attuned to changing labor market conditions, and use training providers that can deliver high-quality services,” Hanson writes.
“We know what effective training looks like, but not how to achieve it for society as a whole. Ongoing mass investments in secondary education, plus the digitization of education and employment data, mean that we have the capability to build the workforce development that the developing world deserves.”
Development policy does not operate in a social vacuum, write Aditi Bhowmick and Eliana La Ferrara. Programs are implemented within communities that are structured by norms governing cooperation, authority, gender roles, kinship, inheritance, and social hierarchy, to name a few.
“These norms shape which policies ‘fit’ a given context and determine how promising interventions play out in practice: Do they work? Do their effects persist? Or do such policies backfire and generate unintended consequences?” ask Bhowmick and La Ferrara.
“Academic research has come a long way in understanding the many ways in which social norms influence and are influenced by development programs. This essay outlines a vision to bring social norms at the heart of the practice of development policy, which remains largely norm-blind. We start by making the case for why it is imperative to move toward a norm-aware standard in terms of how development policy is designed and implemented by practitioners, and then go on to provide a blueprint for how to get there.”
Much international development practice remains oriented toward funding best practice ideas about what emerging societies should do to experience these improvements—what policies to adopt, what institutional forms to emulate, and what interventions to implement. “I see this in the solutions development agencies frequently prescribe, like liberalizing markets to foster growth, constructing clinics to reduce maternal mortality, strengthening transparency mechanisms to improve governance, or adopting digital technologies to enhance service delivery,” writes Matt Andrews.
Many of these recommendations are sensible and potentially beneficial. Yet they often prove insufficient—and sometimes wholly ineffective—in producing sustained improvements in real outcomes. In many cases, countries succeed only in adopting these solutions in form, changing the appearance of institutions or policies without transforming how systems actually function, resulting in reforms that are formally adopted but weakly implemented and rarely sustained.
“I define development as “good change,” a process through which societies adapt to address problems they care about in ways that endure. This definition emphasizes two essential features. First, development is inherently contextual: what counts as ‘good’ depends on socially defined priorities within particular societies. Second, development is fundamentally dynamic: it involves continuous adaptation as conditions, constraints, and aspirations evolve. International development, in turn, can be understood as the efforts external actors make to help emerging societies achieve durable improvements in the things they value.”
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