International Development Cooperation and Multipolarity: Scrambling North and South?

Abstract

The field of International Development Cooperation (IDC) has undergone a structural transformation since 2010. International agreements such as the United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Paris Agreement and the Addis Ababa Agenda for Action had profound impacts upon the IDC field to the point that many of its elements lost relevance (Orliange 2020). While in 2015, internationally agreed goals established the most ambitious development agenda ever adopted, the political will needed for its implementation collapsed in 2016, with the rise of far-right governments in key countries like the UK and USA (Zoccal, in this issue). Moreover, there is a clear mismatch between goals and the means of implementation, due to a conspicuous disconnection between narratives, strategies and instruments, according to Klingebiel and Gonsior, in this issue. The lasting crisis of Official Development Assistance (ODA) is at the center of the disentanglement between development goals and IDC. During the last decade “development assistance” was pronounced dead many times by analysts in different positions within the international development cooperation field (Janus et al. 2015). Practitioners like Jean-Michel Severino and Olivier Ray, from the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), announced the end of ODA due to its relatively little success in fostering economic convergence and the emergence of new challenges, such as the provision of global public goods related to climate change, food security and public health, to name a few (Severino and Ray 2009). Furthermore, analysts like Andrew Rogers and Homi Kharas, from the Overseas Development Institute, acknowledged that the Paulo Esteves1 1Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Institute of International Relations, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil (esteves_paulo@puc-rio.br).