Who Shapes Development?

As the polycrisis of global ecological, political, economic and societal breakdown interacts and unfolds across sites and scales, the need to reform and reorient the international development cooperation regime is urgent. Locally led development (LLD) emerged as a panacea for development ineffectiveness across successive policy paradigms from the Washington Consensus to the Wall Street Consensus. To address these questions, this paper critically analyses the policies and practices of thirty-two institutional donors to assess the extent to which localisation and LLD are recognised and operationalised, enabled and constrained in practice. We offer insights on the current conjuncture and the potentialities within LLD to catalyse disruptive rather than destructive forces and transform development in a post-consensus era.

In the context of interconnected crises and shifting geopolitical dynamics, the imperative to reimagine how development is practiced and studied has grown increasingly urgent. This paper advances a methodological intervention in development research by drawing on insights from multi-sited empirical work that examines development governance through the lens of assemblage thinking. Using illustrative cases from studies from Ukraine and Costa Rica, we demonstrate how assemblage approaches can illuminate development governance as a dynamic, relational, and multi-scalar field of practice. Assemblage thinking pushes analysis beyond fixed spatial, temporal, and institutional frameworks, offering a productive lens through which to examine the entangled, emergent, and contested nature of development governance.

As the polycrisis of the current conjuncture interacts and unfolds across sites and scales, the core democratic institutions of the European Union experienced their own localised crises of confidence and legitimacy with the eruption of Qatargate, a bribery and corruption scandal involving cash transfers through fake non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to European Parliamentarians, in December 2022. We examine the longer-term geo-historical context within which this crisis is embedded and undertake a critical policy analysis of EU policies and parliamentary deliberations on development cooperation and NGO accountability and transparency. We find evidence of a distinct drift over time from universal to EU values and interests with a deepening role for the EU/state in controlling NGO relationships.