By Irina Bilyalova
The Harvard Center for International Development (CID) held its 17th annual Global Empowerment Meeting (GEM), GEM26: Reimagining International Development, on May 4-5, 2026, at Harvard Kennedy School. Convening leading thinkers and practitioners from public policy, business, academia, philanthropy, and civil society, GEM26 explored how a fragmented global landscape is reshaping what development can and should mean in the coming decades.
Over two days of panels, working sessions, and interactive GEM Incubation Rooms, participants grappled with a shared challenge: the world that built the modern development architecture is no longer the world development must serve. Aid budgets are under pressure, geopolitical competition is intensifying, climate and technology transitions are accelerating, and countries are searching for new pathways to shared prosperity.
Across the conference, one theme emerged clearly: reimagining development is not a rhetorical exercise. It requires new models of economic transformation, new ways to invest in people, new forms of partnership between public and private actors, and new narratives that move beyond charity toward agency, opportunity, and mutual interest.
Rethinking Growth Beyond the Factory Floor
GEM26 opened on May 4 with the official launch of the Reimagining the Economy Project's global economic transformation initiative (a new research program under CID). In welcoming participants, CID Faculty Director Asim I. Khwaja and Reimagining the Economy Co-Directors Gordon Hanson and Dani Rodrik framed the day around questions of growth, jobs, structural change, and the future of inclusive economic transformation.
Opening the meeting, Khwaja described the current period as “the most momentous moment since the last 80 years,” comparing it to the post-Bretton Woods era. He emphasized the importance of moving beyond traditional hierarchies of expertise and recognizing the “power of local” knowledge, collaboration, and experimentation.
“The idea that knowledge and expertise lies in the north and resources lie in the north,” Khwaja noted, “and this grand global spillover will happen,” is increasingly being challenged by locally driven innovation and policy experimentation.
Rodrik underscored that development economists are now confronting a changed global economy. The familiar export-led manufacturing pathway, he argued, has become less reliable as a broad escalator for growth. "The development model, growth model, that had become second nature to practitioners has eroded, and it's no longer applicable," Rodrik said.
The first session, Skipping the Factory: Service-Led Growth and Structural Transformation in the Developing World, challenged one of development's most familiar assumptions: that broad-based prosperity must follow the manufacturing-led path of earlier industrializers. Michael Peters and Fabrizio Zilibotti from Yale University presented research on whether developing economies moving from agriculture into services can still generate sustained improvements in living standards.
The discussion asked what happens when urban jobs are increasingly created in retail, transport, food service, personal care, and other service sectors rather than in factories. Rodrik framed the challenge directly: "The bulk of jobs that are being created in the urban areas in the developing world today are being absorbed into urban services," he said. "We need to figure out a way how to turn these jobs into more productive, good jobs."
That focus continued in the afternoon panel on quality work, just transitions, and shared prosperity. Haroon Bhorat (University of Cape Town), Marcela Eslava (Universidad de Los Andes), Amir Lebdioui (Oxford University), Raghuram Rajan (Chicago Booth School of Business), Celestin Monga (Harvard Kennedy School), and moderator Gordon Hanson (Harvard Kennedy School) examined how countries can manage technological disruption, regional inequality, and the energy transition while still creating pathways to inclusive growth.
From Local Experimentation to National Strategy
The day concluded with a panel on Orchestrating Economic Transformation: From Local Experiments to National Strategy. Yuen Yuen Ang (Johns Hopkins University), Eliana Carranza (World Bank), Santiago Levy (Brookings Institution), Arkebe Oqubay (SOAS University of London), and moderator Dani Rodrik (Harvard Kennedy School) examined how institutions can learn from what is working locally and scale those lessons into broader economic strategies.
Yuen Yuen Ang described the need for what she called "directed improvisation," a model in which government does not simply dictate outcomes but creates the conditions for adaptation and learning. "In the 21st century, we have to confront a new question, which is, what can governments do when they don't know in advance what will work?" she said. "Uncertainty is not a bug. It is a feature."
Levy, drawing on Mexico's experience, argued that manufacturing success alone is not enough if the underlying structure of incentives keeps workers and firms segmented. "Manufacturing is not enough to carry out the sort of productive transformation that we all have in mind," he said. "If we want transformation of society, you've got to transform societies in a deep sense."
Oqubay emphasized the discipline required to move from pilots to scale, drawing on Ethiopia's housing and industrial park experiences to show why sequencing, adaptation, and honest course correction matter.
Moving from Poverty to Potential
On May 5, GEM26 shifted from economic transformation to a broader question: what would it mean to organize development around human potential? Opening remarks from Harvard leadership, including Vice Provost for International Affairs Mark Elliott and Harvard Kennedy School Dean Jeremy Weinstein, set the stage for a day focused on the new era of global development.
Weinstein framed the moment as both urgent and larger than any single political cycle. "The world that development was built for is not the world that we live in now," he said, pointing to fiscal constraints, demographic change, climate stress, conflict, technological disruption, and demands for greater agency from emerging economies.
In Pathways to a Thriving World, Khwaja and CID Executive Director Fatema Z. Sumar previewed ideas from their forthcoming work From Poverty to Potential and marked the launch of Development Reimagined: Pathways to a Thriving World, a new collection of essays from CID faculty affiliates and scholars across the University.
Khwaja reflected on the need to remain grounded in real-world complexity. Recalling his own intellectual journey, he said, "I didn't want to abstract away from reality. I wanted to be in reality. I wanted to be in the messy world that I grew up with."
Their framing challenged participants to move beyond a development model organized primarily around deprivation. Poverty reduction remains essential, they argued, but the next phase of development must also ask what people need in order to thrive. Sumar described the shift as one from financing as the center of the system to people as the center of the system. "We need to start making money work for people, and not people working for money," she said.
"What if we flip the fraction? What if we start thinking about how to measure people as assets in the numerator?"
- Fatema Z. Sumar, Executive Director, Harvard CID
The morning's panel, International Development in Time and Space, brought Nobel laureates Esther Duflo (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Michael Kremer (University of Chicago), and James Robinson (University of Chicago) together with Rachel Glennerster (Center for Global Development) and moderator Samantha Power (former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; HKS faculty) into conversation about development's historical record and future direction. The panelists examined the role of economists and evidence in international development efforts and shared spirited remarks about what has worked, what has not, and how the field should respond when evidence, politics, and institutions are all under strain.
Why Narrative Is Development Infrastructure
At lunch, GEM26 turned to storytelling. From the Margins to the Pages featured Peter Klein and Kathryn Gretsinger of the Global Reporting Centre at the University of British Columbia and Hind AbuAlia, Head of Marketing, Amazon Ads, Expansion Markets EMEA & Australia. The session highlighted CID's partnership with UBC journalism students and Harvard Kennedy School policy students, who reported on the real-world consequences of global aid disruption in Lesotho, Cambodia, and Jordan this year.
Klein and Gretsinger emphasized that the model was not parachute journalism. It paired journalists with technical experts, encouraged humility, and asked students to enter complex development stories with evidence, empathy, and care. In the stories they reported, assumptions were often upended: expected replacements for aid did not materialize, and the local consequences of funding cuts were more specific and human than broad policy debates often capture.
AbuAlia then pushed participants to think about narrative as infrastructure. "The truth is, storytelling actually happens at the end," she said. "Narrative is not the output, it is the infrastructure, and it is actually an upstream piece."
For development, the implication was direct. If the audience has changed, the field needs better stories. AbuAlia asked participants to consider the upstream choices behind every story: who is centered, what role the audience is assigned, what value is framed, and what future becomes imaginable.
Closing the session, Sumar connected AbuAlia's framework back to the conference's broader theme, asking how the sector can shift from a charity and poverty focused lens towards investment and human potential.
Doing Development Differently
The afternoon panel, Doing Development Differently, examined how development is increasingly being shaped beyond traditional aid institutions. Moderated by Maroof Syed (CERP | Evidence Matters), the conversation brought together Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu (Institute for Governance and Economic Transformation), Michelle Nunn (CARE), Khalil Shariff (Aga Khan Foundation Canada), Mostafa Terrab (OCP Group), and Juliana Velasquez Rodriguez (Proantioquia) to discuss the roles of markets, capital, philanthropy, faith-based networks, cities, and large-scale platforms.
The panel reflected the conference's broader insistence that development is no longer confined to official assistance. Private firms, foundations, civil society organizations, local leaders, and community institutions are already deploying capital, shaping incentives, and building delivery systems at scale.
Moghalu challenged the field to rethink where development conversations happen and who is accountable for outcomes. "The development conversation must move from Boston, from Washington, from Beijing, from Paris, to where it belongs," he said. "It belongs in Lagos, it belongs in Nairobi, it belongs in Lesotho."
The panel closed with a call for local ownership and institutional humility. Shariff argued that the field should avoid replacing one dogma with another: "Maybe principles, but no more blueprints." Velasquez Rodriguez put the point more sharply: "Development should not be delivered by people who can leave to people who must stay."
Incubating the Next Development Agenda
GEM26 closed with five interactive Incubation Rooms designed to turn discussion into early-stage collaboration. Participants worked across themes including investing in human capital; global health visibility, voice, and accountability; development cooperation; the future of development finance; and developmental sovereignty in an age of geopolitics.
One room, The Future of Development Finance: Mandate, Capital, and Legitimacy in a Fractured World, examined the changing role of development finance institutions (DFIs). Facilitated by Brian Trelstad (Harvard Business School), Nick O'Donohoe (former British International Investment), H.E. Dr. Rania Al-Mashat (former Minister of Planning, Economic Development & International Cooperation, Arab Republic of Egypt), and Wasim Tahir (HKS), the room asked how DFI mandates are changing as aid budgets decline, national interests become more explicit, and private capital remains difficult to mobilize in many developing markets.
Participants identified three concrete directions for future work: research on how national interest influences DFI mandates; a roadshow model to highlight country-level investment opportunities and attract private capital to overlooked markets; and a nationally owned impact measurement framework that could be shared across DFIs, recipient countries, and the broader development ecosystem.
The room's deliberations reflected a larger GEM26 message: development institutions must be able to explain their purpose, measure their impact, and build constituencies for their work. Without that, even effective programs can become politically vulnerable.
Each additional incubation room surfaced a similar tension between urgency and fragmentation, while offering grounded ideas to move forward. Across all rooms, a common thread emerged: today’s challenges are not just technical but institutional and political, requiring new coalitions, clearer narratives, and more adaptive models of collaboration.
Looking Forward: Reimagining Development for a Fragmented World
GEM26 concluded by returning to the promise and urgency of reimagination. The conference did not offer a single replacement model for development. Instead, it surfaced a set of linked questions that will shape the field's next chapter: how to create good jobs in economies no longer following familiar industrial pathways; how to organize around human potential; how to defend and improve development cooperation; how to build narratives that expand rather than diminish agency; and how to redesign institutions for a world of shocks, scarcity, and interdependence.
The discussions at GEM26 made clear that international development is being tested. But they also pointed toward a more constructive possibility: a field that is more locally grounded, more institutionally creative, more honest about power and incentives, and more ambitious about what it means for people and societies to thrive.
Irina Bilyalova
Irina Bilyalova is an international development and governance professional with over a decade of experience across the United Nations system, public sector institutions, and international partnerships. Most recently, she served as Head of UNHCR Kazakhstan, leading work on policy reform, inclusion, displacement, and institutional coordination with governments and multilateral partners in Central Asia.
Global Empowerment Meeting
Revisit the important conversations from GEM26: Reimagining International Development.
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