By Hanul Park
What is the Future of Aid?
“Aid is not going anywhere. Its discourse, however, is evolving rapidly.”
This was a comment made by one interviewee near the end of an in-depth interview. For months, we had been discussing the chaotic landscape of international aid amid many recent geopolitical upheavals, and this succinct analysis crystallized what we were hearing from practitioners, academics, and thought leaders: aid is never going to look the same, but it isn’t finished yet.
The research our team—Sahar Bazaz, Matilde Pozzi, and I— conducted was part of an applied research project at the Geneva Graduate Institute, in partnership with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). Our study was launched at a time of crisis for international aid: USAID had been dismantled and diplomatic relations were in tatters. The UK was slashing programs and channeling money to defense priorities instead. Western Europe was closing its wallets amid a surge in right-wing populism. The alarm over these cuts was palpable, and the effects often proved to be as drastic as feared. But, as the shock wore off and budgets stabilized, a sense of grim optimism emerged—that there is still a future for the aid sector.
The Evolution of Crisis and the Rise of Global Public Goods
The world today is not facing one crisis, but many. They are overlapping, mutually reinforcing, and increasingly hard to separate. This is what is now widely referred to as a "polycrisis." These challenges are reshaping what aid is for. Traditionally, development assistance focused on reducing poverty in specific countries, but lately, a new concept has moved to the center of the conversation: Global Public Goods, or GPGs.
GPGs are conditions such as climate stability, pandemic control, and food security that no single country can maintain alone, but which benefit everyone. The war in Ukraine disrupting global food supply chains, or desertification in the Sahel driving migration toward Europe, are reminders that development problems no longer stay in the location where they start.
The numbers reflect this shift. The share of bilateral Official Development Assistance (ODA) from OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members directed toward GPGs rose from 37% in 2007–2011 to 60% in 2017–2021. But this is not an uncomplicated trend: As resources flow toward climate and humanitarian priorities, there is a real risk that traditional poverty reduction gets crowded out. Expanding who aid serves while protecting the most vulnerable—our research suggests that tension is one of the defining challenges ahead.
The Crumbling Myth of Altruism
At a time when the need for aid is greater than ever, public trust in altruism is weakening. This was a consistent theme across our interviews. Aid is increasingly portrayed as inefficient, wasteful, and secondary to domestic priorities. Development actors have not done enough to counter these narratives, and in failing to do so, have ceded ground to populist arguments.
The consequences are showing up in budgets. The UK cut its ODA from 0.5% to 0.3% of Gross National Income, redirecting the savings to defense initiatives. Belgium announced a 25% reduction over five years. The dismantling of USAID was the most dramatic expression of all. One interviewee put it plainly: “Our biggest challenge is to survive.”
To remain relevant under such hostile circumstances, aid agencies have started to reinvent themselves. For a long time, development aid was framed as a one-way act of generosity from the Global North to the Global South. That language is shifting. A Belgian official reframed their agency not as a development institution but as an “international cooperation partner” and was candid about what that means: “Pursuing national interest is not new. What is new is that we are more transparent about it.” The national interest that always existed beneath the surface of altruism is now being named openly.
Emerging donors never pretended otherwise. A Chinese interviewee emphasized “win-win” solutions. An Indian interviewee was direct: “We cannot really think of development partnership as a selfless activity.” What is interesting is that traditional donors are now speaking the same language. Is that really such a bad thing? Not necessarily. At the very least, honesty creates a more realistic starting point for dialogue and cooperation.
There is another side to this story, one that several interviewees from non-traditional donor countries raised. The retreat of traditional donors, they argued, is not necessarily bad for recipient countries. For decades, those countries had little choice: accept conditioned aid or receive nothing. But as China, India, and Gulf states have emerged as alternative partners, recipient countries now have real negotiating leverage for the first time. The power dynamics that have long defined the aid relationship may be shifting, not automatically toward something more equitable, but toward something more open.
The New Architects of Multilateralism
While aid agencies have been scrambling to reposition themselves, the multilateral system has been under its own pressure. With USAID gone, UN contributions cut, and major donors tightening their budgets, the diagnosis of multilateralism in crisis has been everywhere. Last year in Geneva, rumors circulated about the elevators in UN buildings being shut down and staff crowdfunding their own salaries as the scale of US cuts began to register. But what we found in our interviews was more nuanced, and at times, hopeful. Multilateralism is not collapsing. It is being reorganized, and the reorganization is happening on three fronts simultaneously.
The first front is how non-DAC donors are engaging with multilateral institutions. Rather than rejecting the existing system, they are entering it on their own terms. Qatar has been reporting its development assistance through OECD DAC and UNOCHA's Financial Tracking Service since 2020 and is also participating in the Multilateral Organisation Performance Assessment Network (MOPAN). The reasoning was direct: “We recognized that meaningful participation in global policymaking requires engagement with international institutions and adherence to established reporting norms.” China launched the Global Development Initiative at the UN General Assembly in 2021, signaling a deeper commitment to shaping multilateral development discourse. India has made platforms like the G20 central to its development diplomacy, using them to bring developed and developing countries to the same table.
The second shift is at the level of multilateral development banks. When the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was established under Chinese leadership, many read it as a challenge to the existing order. When we spoke to both AIIB and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) however, neither saw the other as a competitor. As one AIIB interviewee put it: “Multilateral Development Banks(MDBs) now operate as one system. Co-financing and cross-institutional collaboration have clearly increased compared to twenty or thirty years ago.”
The third change is quieter but significant. Traditional donors continue to support multilateral institutions, but how they do so is shifting. Between 2013 and 2022, the share of earmarked contributions rose from 32% to 49% of total contributions to multilateral organizations. Core funding, meanwhile, has grown in absolute terms but shrunk in relative share. This implies that multilateral bodies are increasingly being used as vehicles for bilateral objectives rather than as independent agenda-setters.
In short, with traditional donors stepping back from using multilateral tools to advance national interests, new ones are stepping in. Multilateralism is not weakening, but who leads it, and to what end, is changing.
The End of the Binary
One of the challenges we did not anticipate going into this research was the language itself. Our research questions were framed around how “traditional donors” and “emerging donors” are responding to a changing aid landscape. But as the interviews unfolded, we kept running into a more fundamental question: what makes a donor traditional or emerging? The binary we had taken for granted was challenged, repeatedly, by the people we spoke to.
An interviewee from the Qatar Fund for Development (QFFD) pushed back on the label directly: “We, the Gulf countries, are called ‘emerging donors,’ but we do not see ourselves that way.” The Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development was established in 1961—the same year as Switzerland's SDC. The Abu Dhabi Fund for Development followed in 1971, and the Saudi Fund for Development in 1974, around the same time as the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (1965) and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (1968). The fact that they are still called "emerging" says less about them and more about whose contributions the international system has historically chosen to recognize.
China presents the opposite tension. In some genuine sense, China is a newer player in development cooperation; its institutional experience is shorter, and a Chinese interviewee acknowledged as much: “Chinese diplomats are still learning, compared to their Western counterparts who have decades of institutional history.” Yet the international community holds China to standards equal to or higher than any established donor on transparency, human rights, and environmental safeguards. It is treated as a newcomer in experience but held to veteran-level expectations, a double standard that speaks as much to geopolitical tensions as to development norms.
Korea presented its own puzzle. It did not fit neatly into either category, as the country is clearly not a traditional donor in the Western sense, yet it is far from a marginal one. In fact, at the very moment we were conducting this research, Korea was nearly doubling its aid budget while most Western donors were cutting theirs. These cookie cutter labels simply did not hold.
Similarly, the traditional vs. emerging divide, a categorization largely shaped by Western-led institutions, does not map onto reality. In the evolving aid landscape, perceived identity can no longer reliably explain how donors behave or what decisions they make. And that points to a larger discussion: the rules of who counts as a donor, whose contributions are recognized, and who gets to shape the norms of development cooperation are all being rewritten. Perhaps the lines themselves can no longer be drawn—and perhaps that is exactly the point.
The Path Forward
Looking back across our findings, four shifts stand out.
1. The scope of what aid addresses has expanded. Poverty reduction remains central, but it is now pursued within a broader framework that encompasses climate, food security, migration, and peace, or what the field has come to call Global Public Goods.
2. The logic driving aid has changed from altruism to mutual interest, and from one-way transfer to strategic cooperation. This may be the end of a certain kind of hypocrisy, and the beginning of a more honest conversation.
3. Multilateralism is not disappearing but transforming, as new actors enter existing institutions on their own terms and traditional donors use multilateral channels more strategically.
4. The line between donor and recipient, traditional and emerging, is blurring, and emerging economies are increasingly shaping, not just receiving, the development agenda.
Through all of this, what struck me most in our interviews was not the anxiety, though there was plenty of it, but the persistence of a desire to cooperate and communicate. People across very different institutions, with very different histories and interests, kept returning to the same idea: that this moment of disruption could be an opening, if it prompts the right conversations.
Norway and Sweden's Rethinking Development Cooperation Working Group, launched in 2023, is one small example of what that can look like. It brings together officials from a wide range of development agencies on equal footing, under Chatham House rules, without a formal agenda or expected outcome. The aim is simply to understand one another, and to build from there the trust that future cooperation will require. As the era of “development” gives way to an era of “cooperation,” more spaces like this will be needed, across more levels, between more actors, with more honesty about where interests align and where they diverge.
I will admit that when SDC first proposed this project, I felt a certain heaviness about it, because I thought I already knew the answer. When the United States froze all foreign aid in January 2025, while we were still deep in our literature review, it felt like confirmation. But as the interviews unfolded through February and March, something shifted. Everyone we spoke to was still worried. But everyone was also, in their own way, adapting. We realized they were looking for ways to cushion the blow for the people most dependent on aid while searching for new forms of cooperation that might improve on the old ways of doing business.
“Aid is not going anywhere. But it is evolving fast.” As our interviewee mentioned, aid is not disappearing. It is being rewritten, in the language of cooperation rather than development, partnership rather than altruism. That rewriting is incomplete and imperfect. But, it is happening. And the most vulnerable people, the ones this work is ultimately for, cannot afford for the rest of us to stop finding ways to work together on their behalf.
This essay is a personal reflection based on a collaborative research project. The full report, co-authored with Sahar Bazaz and Matilde Pozzi, is available here.
Hanul Park
Hanul Park is a master’s candidate in the dual degree program between the Geneva Graduate Institute and Harvard Kennedy School’s Mid-Career Master in Public Administration (MC/MPA) program. For the 2025-2026 academic year, she has also served as a CID student ambassador. She is deeply committed to promoting equal opportunities and advancing sustainable development worldwide.
Gavin Li vis Unsplash
