External publications

Beyond aid: new ways forward?

Janus, Heiner / Stephan Klingebiel / Sebastian Paulo
External Publications (2014)

in: Development and Cooperation 41 (7), 292

In the face of a changing global context, development cooperation needs to redefine its role. The term “beyond aid” sums up the pressure to innovate as well as ideas for reform. It is inconsistently used to describe any actual or apparent reform in this policy area. Nonetheless, some dimensions have become obvious. “Beyond aid” is an umbrella term for the transformation of official development assistance and its decline in relative importance. Development cooperation needs to learn how to link up to different dimensions of “beyond aid”. There are now two ways forward that are not mutually exclusive: development cooperation can specialise in a shrinking number of poor countries or integrate into the broader framework of international cooperation to address a wider range of global challenges. How development policy makers and their agencies respond to the changing global landscape will have huge consequences for their operations. There is no way to escape the fundamental “beyond aid” debate in the near future.