Image by Gerhard Bögner on Pixabay
These are not easy times to think about reforming or even rebuilding the international cooperation architecture to meet the challenges facing humanity. When international law is bluntly disregarded, multilateral institutions get openly attacked and institutions for global solidarity are dismantled, it is only natural to defend what has been achieved as far as possible and, at best, to strive for incremental improvements. However, this entails the risk of remaining stuck in outdated patterns instead of looking for fresh solutions for a thoroughly changed world.
FfD4 is trapped in a decades-old path dependency.
In June/July 2025, world leaders will gather in Seville, Spain, for the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4). They will meet in an environment for global development and international cooperation that could hardly be more different from 2002 when the 1st FfD Conference took place in Monterrey, Mexico. However, today’s FfD process seems trapped in a decades-old path dependency.
The Monterrey conference convened just six months after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and adopted the Monterrey Consensus on Financing for Development as a kind of twin sister to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This was seen as an expression of a renewed spirit of global solidarity after the end of the Cold War and at the peak of the unipolar moment, despite the heavy shadow cast by the newly initiated war on terror.
This year’s Seville conference will meet in an increasingly multipolar, volatile and tense geopolitical environment, after more than three years of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and only six months into the second Trump presidency. Against this rather unpromising backdrop, it is rather questionable whether the Seville conference can achieve its objective of “reform(ing) financing at all levels” to get the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) back on track.
Just as the geopolitical situation has changed since the turn of the century, so have the global challenges and the global development landscape. In a sense, the MDGs were the culmination and end point of the traditional development discourse that unfolded after decolonization during the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast, the SDGs address global challenges of the 21st century and set universal goals to be implemented in and by all countries, building on the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20).
The Addis Ababa Action Agenda does not match the universal ambition of the SDGs.
With their donor-driven focus on a limited number of goals, the MDGs had »reduced development to ending poverty, replacing earlier definitions of development as transformation of the productive potential of national economies«. As the MDG process stood for the normative narrowing of the development discourse, the FfD process took the place of what was once the larger discourse on the New World Economic Order. At the time, FfD was innovative and transformative because it was based on unprecedented cooperation of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods Institutions and recognized the responsibilities of both the “developing” and the “developed” countries in areas such as mobilisation of domestic and international private and public finance, trade, aid and debt. In Monterrey, FfD was fit-for-purpose: the MDGs were an agenda to be achieved in and by “developing” countries with the cooperation of “developed” countries.
In 2015, the 2030 Agenda expanded the concept of development in three ways: (1) by (re-)including topics such as infrastructure and cities, industrialization and innovation, inequality and peaceful and inclusive societies, (2) by integrating the environmental dimension with global challenges such as climate change, oceans and biodiversity, and (3) by applying the new universal concept of sustainable development to all countries. These changes were significant not only for the high-income countries but also brought the growing number of middle-income countries back to the centre of the global development discourse.
However, the 2030 Agenda’s Means of Implementation (MoIs) did not match the universal ambition of the SDGs. Instead, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, adopted by the 3rd FfD conference in July 2015 became its main pillar of implementation, focussing solely on implementation in “developing” countries. No comparable mechanisms were set up to enhance implementation in “developed” countries. While 25 of the MoIs of the 2030 Agenda are purely universal, 37 MoIs are exclusively or specially geared towards implementation in “developing” countries, and none (!) of the 62 MoIs has at least a special focus on implementation in “developed” countries. This lopsided universality not only contributes to the SDGs being increasingly misunderstood as an agenda primarily for the “developing” countries but also constitutes a major obstacle to the implementation of the SDGs in the “developed” countries. Even ten years after the adoption of the 2030 Agenda, the FfD process has not been able to open up to the universality needed to implement an agenda as universal as the SDGs.
No global transformation without transformation in high-income countries
There should be no doubt that huge additional external resources and significant reforms to the global financial framework are necessary to enable low- and middle-income countries to achieve the SDGs. FfD4 in Seville will have to discuss how to take this forward in the light of significant blows to international cooperation from the US, UK, and others. At the same time, we should not close our eyes to the fact that without implementing the SDGs also within the richer countries and in the relations between them there will be no universal sustainable development, neither for the planet nor for the poorer countries.
The most obvious reason for this lies with the spillovers, e.g. from the unsustainable productions and consumption patterns in richer countries that negatively affect both planetary boundaries and poorer countries. There is little to nothing of multilateral monitoring of these issues, let alone a systematic implementation and enforcement of “policy coherence for sustainable development” as called for by the 2030 Agenda in SDG 17.
Another reason lies in the financial system of the richer countries which in most cases is neither sufficiently oriented enough towards ambitious sustainable development in these countries themselves nor does it channel the necessary financial resources to poorer countries. The show is mainly run by the stock exchanges in the US, Europe, and China. Moreover, the high regulatory standards in many richer countries, including the European Union’s taxonomy of sustainable finance, are poorly linked to the needs of financing sustainable development on a global scale. Rather, they are likely to attract global capital seeking safe (and sustainable) investments to those very countries.
And finally, sustainable development will only (re-)gain political traction in the richer countries if people there see the SDGs as something that also means a better life for them. Rising inequality, poor education, dwindling social cohesion, threats to accountable and transparent institutions, and a lack of integration of migrants show that many richer countries are failing to make progress even on core societal SDGs. This only boosts authoritarian and populist tendencies, encourages zero-sum thinking, and undermines the willingness of societies to engage in multilateral cooperation and international solidarity.
Change power imbalances by mutually transformative cooperation!
Thus, there are good reasons for the multilateral system and “developing” countries to take interest in the internal developments of richer countries and to engage with them in a meaningful and effective way. In 2019, UN DESA took a step in this direction by changing the title of its annual FfD reports to Financing for Sustainable Development Report (FfSD) and universalising its approach. This recognised the globalised development approach of the 2030 Agenda and allowed for initial, albeit small, steps to address the financial system of richer countries and their domestic implementation of the SDGs. However, this path was not consistently expanded and pursued. Unfortunately, the FfSD Report 2024 looks at the richer countries, if at all, just in terms of their impact on “developing” countries, namely spillover effects from monetary and financial policies in major “developed” countries. Significantly, the intergovernmental FfD process itself has not even changed its name to Financing for Sustainable Development. It comes as no surprise that the draft outcome document of FfD4 hardly leaves the well-trodden paths of the pre-2015 period. This reflects both the unwise limitation of the “developing” countries to their narrow short-term interests and the “developed” countries‘ reluctance to accept a role for multilateral institutions and international cooperation in their internal affairs as “developing” countries have done for decades.
The underlying power imbalances cannot be overcome simply by changing the way the richer countries deal with the poorer ones. In addition, low- and middle-income countries must also be able to influence domestic developments of high-income countries, particularly via the multilateral institutions. If the richer countries are serious about cooperation on eye level, they should open up accordingly, including by changes to the respective governance mechanisms. The days of mistakenly assuming that one part of the world has the problems and the other the solutions should be long gone. Richer countries can even benefit from such a mutually transformative cooperation and, importantly, rebuild credibility and trust. Similarly, poorer countries can gain agency and profit from participating in richer countries’ discourses as they move away from entrenched negotiating patterns and chart fresh territory. In addition, the new high-income countries and the upper-middle-income countries could find new attractive roles to play in such an international cooperation architecture of the future.
Five proposals for getting started.
Just as the 1st FfD conference in Monterrey, Mexico (2002) presented a new concept in line with the then MDGs, FfD4 in Seville in 2025 should foster the conditions for designing truly universal means of implementation to be incorporated into the beyond-2030 sustainable development agenda. Here are five proposals for getting started:
- FfD should be renamed Financing for Sustainable Development (FfSD) to signal a departure from the traditional aid narrative with its donor-recipient dichotomy, open the door to universal implementation of the SDGs, and prepare a new age of international cooperation beyond 2030 in which low-, middle- and high-income countries both benefit and contribute in a common but differentiated way.
- FfD4 should call on UN DESA and the next Independent Group of Scientist for the Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR 2027) to take a deeper look into the realisation of the SDGs in and by the richer countries and to present ideas for innovative financial and non-financial means of implementation that also promote transformation in “developed” countries. These ideas could then be included in a beyond-2030 agenda.
- FfD4 should ask UNDP and UN development at large to build up operational cooperation functions within high-income countries. Focussing on knowledge work, policy advice, and a few small but highly visible interventions, UN development could play a unique and cost-effective role in richer countries and become a strong voice in societal and political discourses. In the governing bodies, the discussion of country programs for “developed” countries would give “developing” countries the opportunity to shape conditions in rich countries. In this context, the EU should declare its willingness to make substantial additional contributions to the regular (core) resources of UNDP and other funds and programs.
- FfD4 should propose that future triangular cooperation may not only target one beneficiary but bring about transformation to all three parties involved. Such a mutually transformative or circular cooperation would particularly enhance the role of low- and middle-income countries to act vis-à-vis the high-income countries, preventing the poorer countries from sitting exclusively at the receiving end, giving low- and middle-income countries a role in high-income countries, and offering the latter a participation in global processes of mutual learning and change.
- In the context of FfD4 and against the background of a new global landscape, the EU should establish itself as major institutional actor in a future global financial architecture and turn its internal burden-sharing and allocation patterns outwards. For example, it could invite partners around the globe to establish Joint Transformation Banks (JTBs) to finance transformative projects in all participating countries, including within the EU. The existing multilateral development banks seem to be unable or barred to fundamentally change their traditional business models and governance mechanisms. The creation of new JTBs could provide an opportunity for a different approach, building on, but going beyond recent recommendations by an EU-mandated High-Level Expert Group. Jointly owned by richer and poorer countries and based on fair burden sharing and collective decision making, JTBs could have high credit ratings and mobilise private and public finance in all participating countries and beyond, curbing capital flight, and channelling remittances into transformative investments. With an investment portfolio spread across their member countries, JTBs would have good risk diversification and could function as a bridge between the capital markets of poorer and richer countries.
Changing the architecture of global cooperation will not happen overnight or with a big bang. But when the elephant is in the china shop, going into another room may be a way out. Coalitions of the willing must not allow the debate to be obstructed, but should lead by example and open the door to a cooperation architecture where all benefit, all contribute, and all decide. As long-trusted pillars of international cooperation appear to be crumbling and out of step with the challenges of today and tomorrow, the European Union should rise to the geopolitical occasion and open up to new models of partnership and reciprocity across the globe. The beyond-2030 sustainable development agenda urgently needs innovative means of implementation that are truly universal and consistent with today’s global landscape and an agenda that aims to lead all of humanity to the middle of the century. Seville this summer can sow the seeds for a new spring.
This blog post is part of a series on the 4th FfD conference by the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS). Please also read the previous contributions to this series:
- Trump and FfD4 – the Elephant in the Room Starts to Speak (and Destroy), by Sören Hilbrich, Yabibal Walle, and Clara Brandi
- Rationalising Tax Expenditures – a Core Element of Financing for Development, by Christian von Haldenwang and Agustín Redonda
- Forging Consensus: Navigating Trade Controversies in the FfD4 Zero Draft, by Clara Brandi
- Cumbersome but Essential – The United Nations Financing for Development Process Ahead of its 4th Conference, by Kathrin Berensmann, Clara Brandi, Sören Hilbrich, and Yabibal Walle
All blogs express the views of the author(s).
