Is international development dead?

Does anyone remember the Sustainable Development Goals?

Once the lodestar for the global development agenda, the 17 United Nations-backed SDGs were adopted in 2015 to end poverty, protect the environment, and deliver prosperity for all by 2030. From reducing world hunger to promoting sustainable fishing, progress on implementing these goals has either stalled or regressed. A recent ten-year review determined that only 35 percent of the SDGs are on track, with 18 percent regressing. Global hunger has returned to 2005 levels and none of the climate change targets are being met.

Instead of spurring renewed global resolve, the SDGs have coincided with a steep retreat in development spending. Foreign aid levels fell sharply in 2024, and the OECD predicts further declines by all major donors in 2025. The United States, historically the largest global contributor to development assistance, has cut billions from its aid budget through the gutting of USAID.

But it is not only dollar value reductions in foreign aid that have scuppered the SDGs. The goals themselves have come under renewed attack by right-wing nationalist governments. Washington did not merely reduce its funding commitments, it denounced the goals for promoting “gender and climate ideology.”

This retreat is not only confined to the wreckage of US foreign policy. In Britain, Keir Starmer’s Labour government announced significant cuts to development assistance, redirecting funds into defence spending. In Canada, Mark Carney’s recent budget follows a similar pattern: billions in new defence expenditures paired with sweeping cuts to foreign assistance.

The demise of the SDGs is the product of multiple factors, not least the design of the goals themselves, which fail to account for structural inequalities in the global economy and the impossibility of raising sufficient levels of development assistance. But their decline also highlights cracks in the global development agenda, the rise of new actors, and a worrying lack of alternative models.

It is helpful to begin by recognizing that development has always served broader political goals. In 1949, US President Harry Truman announced that the US would provide technical assistance to aid the “underdeveloped areas of the world.” The aims of this announcement were not purely benevolent. Positioning capitalism as the sole pathway to progress was also a strategy of Cold War containment.

That commitment, however, prompted significant debate on how development would be achieved and for whose benefit. Could development be realized through technical support alone? What economic model should guide it? How should progress be measured? This was not purely a theoretical debate. From the 1950s through to the 1970s, newly independent nations put forward an alternative development agenda—the so-called Third World project—aimed at addressing the legacies of colonialism and charting a new development path.

The rise of neoliberalism and the end of the Cold War foreclosed these prospects, giving rise to a global development agenda increasingly aligned with US-based institutions like the World Bank. Increasingly, development came to mean economic growth, achieved through trade liberalization, privatization and a retreat of the state from economic planning.

It was the critique of this model that arguably paved the way for the Millenium Development Goals in 2000 and the SDGs 15 years later. Broadening our understanding of human development and framing the goals as universal was admirable. However, what both sets of goals failed to address was any sense of how they could be achieved without a major restructuring of the global economy. The financing model which underpinned the goals was also built on shaky foundations. Blended finance, the public derisking of private investment, was the strategy. By 2025, this approach has mobilized only a fraction of the trillions needed to achieve the SDGs.

The neoliberal consensus in development thinking was challenged during this period by a wide range of global social movements, the so-called global justice movement of the late 1990s and 2000s. However, these voices were largely drowned out by the emergence of another significant actor, the global NGO industry. The industry was diverse, but included both larger established NGOs, the remnants of social movements, and large celebrity and philanthropic actors, from Bono to Bill Gates.

Rather than challenging the neoliberal consensus, these actors sought to cushion its blows. Their approach fit neatly with neoliberal assumptions that non-state actors should step in where governments had withdrawn.

The actors that characterized this developmental period can be understood through philosopher Nancy Fraser’s term “progressive neoliberalism,” which she uses to characterize the diverse political alliances which propelled Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to power. These were not all hardnose neoliberal formations, but coalitions which brought in elements from the environmental and gender rights movements.

What made progressive neoliberalism so effective at an ideological level, she argues, was its ability to channel some of the goals of previous social movements into neoliberal policy prescriptions.

What we are witnessing today is the collapse of progressive neoliberalism, both on the domestic and international scale. This is characterized not only by attacks on gender and climate ‘ideology’ in the US, but reductions in foreign aid spending, and a growing mistrust of development institutions. Political scientists Sarah Bush and Jennifer Hadden have described this as the end of the NGO age, buried beneath right-wing authoritarianism, negative public perceptions, and reduced aid dollars.

In this interregnum, we are seeing the return of development as an explicitly geopolitical project. As Adam Tooze has argued, the era of a politically neutral, universally endorsed development agenda is over.

What has replaced it are new development actors, most notably China. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing has become one of the major sources of funding for development projects. Tooze asks, “Does China hope and expect that the realization of this agenda will help build friendly relations? Of course it does. Is this a global power play? Of course it is.”

For all their contradictions and limitations, the SDGs represented a significant break with previous growth-based measures of development, encouraging universal progress on a variety of indicators. Their stagnation and reversal are nothing to celebrate—more people will go hungry and perish from treatable diseases.

But what replaces this agenda is less clear. The left, such as it is, struggles to gain traction even at the national level, let alone internationally. The heyday of the global justice movement, of mass mobilizations against the World Trade Organization and the energy of the World Social Forum, now feels like a distant memory.

Rebuilding such internationalism will require recovering solidarity as a foundational principle of left organizing. Glimmers of this are visible in the global Palestinian solidarity movement, which has expanded dramatically over the past two years. It has cohered not only around support for a national liberation struggle, but around shared recognition of how our governments sustain violence and occupation abroad.

If we are witnessing the return of development as an explicitly geopolitical project, as Tooze suggests, then where do developing countries stand? Caught between China’s quest for new mineral developments and the US’s punitive diplomacy, they risk being pulled into regional conflicts and trade disputes which undermine their own development aspirations. Any alternative development vision will need to contend with a more multi-polar world, while also giving voice to those movements pushing for social justice, peace and dignity.

Christopher Webb is a writer and researcher based in Winnipeg. For many years, he taught international development at the University of Toronto and Carleton University.