The Changing Landscape for Global Aid
The Trump administration’s decision to gut its overseas development assistance agency, USAID, and cancel funding to nearly all its programs, has had massive and immediate health, social and economic impacts for countries and communities across the Global South. It has added to the uncertainty in the international aid and development sector and further precipitated a series of policy shifts by other major donor countries in the G7/OECD. The immediate term consequences are already emerging across the developing world and assessment of the key trends and patterns is much needed. The medium- and longer-term implications for global stability and human security are unclear but could potentially further exacerbate conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and Ukraine and accelerate the conditions for others. In this context we ask what the future will look like for development cooperation and humanitarian assistance at different scales/modalities of assistance:
- What are the main impacts and consequences of the current policy changes?
- How are development practitioners and developing societies responding?
- What does this shift imply for medium-term development cooperation efforts and the leveraging of soft power over the longer-term globally?
- Critically, how will these changes impair the “intermediate” efforts to strengthen the resiliency of poor societies aimed at allowing them to build capacity for self-determined and sustainable development?
- What impacts will there be for short-term humanitarian responses to disasters and emergencies?
Join us on June 11 (starting at 2 p.m. ET) as the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, Centre for Refugee Studies, Cooperation Canada, and the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research bring together scholars and practitioners to discuss this moment and possible ways forward to sustain common global efforts for justice.
Panellists and Topics
This opening contribution provides a foundational overview of the global aid architecture. It traces the historical origins and evolution of humanitarian and development aid in the 20th century. This includes the establishment of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and the adoption of the aspirational 0.7% target for Official Development Assistance – a benchmark seldom fully met by donor countries. The discussion then shifts to recent trends, highlighting sharp funding cuts and recent policy that are generating ripple effects. These changes have disrupted global aid flows, weakened multilateral coordination, and raised urgent questions about donor commitment, soft power dynamics, and global equity. By examining both long-standing patterns and current disruptions, this contribution sets the stage for deeper discussions on how development cooperation will have to adapt in an era of retrenchment, geopolitical fragmentation, and intensifying humanitarian and development needs worldwide.
As the global aid architecture is reshaped by donor retrenchment, rising nationalism, and geopolitical instability, civil society organizations are on the front lines of both response and resistance. These shifts are not only reducing predictable and equitable funding, but also entrenching power imbalances that sideline local actors and priorities. At the same time, civil society is facing growing restrictions worldwide: a shrinking civic space that threatens human rights and the foundations of accountable development. In this context, civil society actors are not merely calling for policy adjustments, but for a fundamental rebuilding of the international cooperation system: one that centers equity, restores trust in multilateralism, and ensures civil society has the space and support to lead transformative, locally driven change.
In March 2025, President Trump shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, cutting more than $40 billions of dollars of promised funding (CGD, 2025). Significant media attention has been paid to the devastating ramifications of the cuts for global public health (Mandavilli, 2025). Yet millions of young people are also at risk of losing access to schooling (Relief Web, 2025). In Malawi, a context characterized by historically produced poverty, the U.S. alone contributed over 13% of the country’s overall 2024/2025 budget (Guardian, 2025). While aid can meaningfully impact lives, however, the global aid architecture—the organizations, funding mechanisms, policies, and programs that scaffold development activities worldwide—is deeply flawed, often reproducing power hierarchies rooted in colonial histories and relationships.
This paper draws on a pilot study to (1) consider if and how aid cuts might catalyze decolonization of the education and health sectors and (2) begin to reimagine possibilities for humanitarian engagement. In contrast to scholarship on development and humanitarianism “beyond aid” that focuses on global governance, our project centers how local development workers theorize alternative arrangements for education within highly inequitable systems. Situated between international funders and community-based recipients, Malawian policymakers, NGO staff-members, and fieldworkers are uniquely positioned to reconceptualize aid mechanisms and forge new resourcing futures.
China's role in the global development system and the world economic order has evolved dramatically. The People's Republic of China has provided assistance to developing countries since the 1950s and 1960s, but from the late 1990s onward, China has also emerged as a major international creditor, and a provider of leading-edge science and technology. In the mid-2000s, China undertook UN peacekeeping and supplying humanitarian assistance, and has increased its contributions. In 2013, Beijing launched its ambitious pan-regional Belt and Road Initiative, and in 2019 established China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA). This was all before Trump 2.0. Some commentators suggest that the changes in the global development landscape resulting from the policies of the Donald Trump Administration and the traditional Northern donor governments create further openings for China's expanded influence. The presentation will assess the accuracy of this hypothesis, examining key trends and patterns in China's evolving positioning in global development.
Ravi de Costa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Science and a member of the Graduate Programs in Development Studies and Environmental Studies. He is an interdisciplinary social scientist who works on Indigenous and environmental politics. He also currently serves as the Associate Dean Research & Graduate, in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.
