What will the Global Development Architecture look like in 2030? And What can the EU and UK do to Influence It?
Picture the year 2030. US President JD Vance is in the White House, AI has reshaped labour markets, and climate shocks are harder to ignore. In that setting, what sort of global development system will exist? That question is already on the desks of G7 development ministers and also the G20, who are debating how the development “architecture” should be reorganised. In a new Policy Brief, we map in detail the competing political visions that are visible in 2025 and could dominate by 2030.
The world is moving away from a single, post-2000 consensus around multilateralism and poverty reduction. What replaces it depends on which coalition wins the argument, and then bakes that argument into institutions and finance.
So what are the visions for the global development architecture in 2030 that we see?
One is ‘Aid Retrenchment with Nationalist Conditionality’. Assistance is folded into foreign, trade, and interior policy. Grants shrink, multilateral agencies are sidelined, and cooperation becomes bilateral deals tied to migration control, geopolitical alignment, or access to minerals. Rights, gender, and climate justice recede.
A second world is ‘Strategic Multilateralism’. The multilateral development banks stay central, but their remit narrows to macro-stability, crisis response, and “risk containment”. Concessional finance is rationed to countries seen as fragile or geostrategic. Aid rhetoric turns technocratic and securitised and health framed as biosecurity.
A third vision is ‘Pluralist Development Cooperation’. There is no single system, but many partially overlapping regimes: Chinese, Indian, Gulf, regional, and club initiatives. Low and middle income countries gain bargaining space by choosing across offers. The trade-off is fragmentation. Rules on debt workouts, safeguards, and transparency diverge, and global public goods struggle for predictable funding.
Finally, a fourth vision is ‘Global Solidarity 2.0’. Development cooperation is rebuilt around shared risks such as climate stability, pandemics, antimicrobial resistance, and debt contagion. North and South co-lead a pooled Global Public Goods Facility. Contributions reflect income and carbon profile, and access reflects exposure to cross-border risk. The donor-recipient binary fades, even if frictions persist.
Why does all this matter now to the UK and EU?
ODA is falling in many donors, and the United States is pressing multilateral bodies to narrow mandates. Southern and regional finance is rising, and new coalitions are offering their own institutional blueprints. The result is a contest over norms and governance, not a routine budget squeeze.
For UK and EU policymakers, the immediate question is whether they aim to shape this contest or simply adapt to it.
The May 2025 UK–EU “Common Understanding” on development dialogue gives a platform for joint positioning. Choices made in the next G7 and G20 rounds will tilt the field to one of these futures.
Our scenario sketching is intended to inform real-time debates on architecture reform heading into 2026. What kind of world is sought? Choices are stark. A world of coercive bilateralism looks very different from one of pooled global public goods. We set out what each world implies for poverty, inequality, climate action, and policy autonomy. If you are tracking where development cooperation is heading, or trying to influence it, the different worlds show where things may end up in 2030.
Stephan Klingebiel heads the research program “Inter- and Transnational Cooperation” at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS). He previously led the UNDP Global Policy Centre in Seoul (2019–2021) and the KfW Development Bank’s office in Kigali, Rwanda (2007–2011). He is also a guest professor at the University of Turin (Italy), a senior lecturer at the University of Bonn, and an Honorary Distinguished Fellow at Jindal University (India).
Andy Sumner is Professor of International Development at King’s College, London, and President of European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI). He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Royal Society of Arts; a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Economics and Development Studies at Padjadjaran University, Indonesia; and Senior Non-Resident Research Fellow at the United Nations University, WIDER, Helsinki and the Center for Global Development, Washington DC.
Photo by Martin Lopez
