Beyond Aid: The Political Economy of International Solidarity

Who Counts When Vulnerability Has No Strategic Value?

By Nadia Molenaers

The debate about the future of development cooperation has accelerated sharply. Aid budgets are shrinking in several donor countries. Geopolitical rivalry is reshaping international partnerships. New actors and new financing mechanisms are challenging long-standing assumptions about how international cooperation should be organised. For many observers, the central question is what comes after aid.

Recent contributions have mapped the changing landscape. Klingebiel and Sumner describe development cooperation facing futures that range from renewed multilateralism to nationalist retrenchment. Alonso reminds us that these futures will heavily depend on geopolitics: whether international cooperation evolves around solidarity, strategic competition, transactional bargaining, or some combination of the three remains uncertain, and on all three axes he identifies, the direction is contested, not settled.

At the same time, a growing body of scholarship and advocacy are constructing alternatives that challenge donor-recipient hierarchies, proposing new models of collective investment, and reforming the international economic rules that generate inequality in the first place. These efforts are serious and deserve to be taken seriously.

Yet they also raise a question that remains insufficiently explored: how can solidarity be sustained in a world increasingly organised around interests, risks, and strategic competition? How do political communities sustain commitments towards vulnerable populations from whom they derive little direct benefit? Under what conditions do governments and citizens accept obligations towards distant others whose suffering creates neither strategic advantages nor immediate risks?

What Has Already Been Built

Several alternative visions have moved beyond critique towards institutional design. While they differ substantially in their assumptions and priorities, they share a common ambition: to address weaknesses that have long characterised the aid system.

The decolonisation agenda begins from a legitimacy critique. A growing body of scholarship – argues that development cooperation is not merely imperfect but structurally shaped by colonial legacies, donor priorities, and asymmetric accountability relationships. Organisations such as IBON International and Groupe URD have moved this critique beyond academic debate and into political advocacy, calling for governance arrangements that shift authority away from traditional donor institutions and towards more representative global structures. At the Fourth Financing for Development Conference in Seville in 2025, IBON and allied organisations pushed explicitly for a binding Convention on Development Cooperation under UN auspices – reframing ODA not as benevolence but as partial reparation. Whether all aspects of the decolonial diagnosis are empirically settled remains contested: power asymmetry, critics rightly note, is not unique to ODA. What is less contested is that questions of power, representation, and accountability can no longer be treated as peripheral concerns.

The Global Public Investment (GPI) initiative starts from a different problem. Its proponents argue that many contemporary challenges are fundamentally collective in nature: climate change, pandemics, biodiversity loss, financial instability, and digital governance cannot be effectively addressed through traditional donor-recipient relationships. GPI therefore proposes a model in which all countries contribute according to capacity, all benefit according to need, and all participate in decision-making. In 2025 the GPI Network adopted a Strategic Plan and launched a Coalition of Governments and International Organisations at the UN General Assembly. By linking international cooperation to shared interests and shared risks, the framework seeks to build broader and more durable political support than traditional aid has often enjoyed. It is worth noting that GPI is not the only institutional alternative in motion: BRICS New Development Bank, regional development banks, and South-South financing arrangements represent equally concrete – and in some cases more established – forms of institutional innovation. GPI is highlighted here because its explicit focus on global public goods and its governance model make it most directly relevant to the tension this blog is examining.

South-South cooperation and regional financing mechanisms address a further concern: dependency. El Doukhi argues that the contraction of traditional aid should accelerate the development of financing arrangements rooted in regional solidarity and domestic resource mobilisation. The African Union Peace Fund and the ASEAN+3 Chiang Mai Initiative point towards forms of (regional) cooperation aiming at more self-reliance and less dependent on traditional donor countries. These developments signal a genuine search for alternatives. At the same time, they remind us that power asymmetries are not unique to North-South relations. Regional powers, emerging economies, and new donors pursue strategic interests of their own -Chinese, Gulf, and regional hegemonic interests shape South-South financing in ways that are not necessarily more solidarity-oriented than traditional ODA.

Finally, the rules reform agenda focuses on the structures that generate global inequality in the first place. Etter-Phoya et al.  demonstrate concretely how profit shifting from Nigeria to European financial systems constitutes a human rights problem, and how the current OECD-led framework falls short of remedy. The broader argument -that illicit financial flows, debt burdens, tax avoidance, trade rules, and intellectual property regimes are estimated by many analysts to transfer more resources from South to North than development cooperation transfers in the opposite direction- insists that addressing structural inequality requires reforming the system that generates it. From this perspective, the most important development intervention may not be additional aid but changes to the international rules governing finance, taxation, trade, and investment.

Each of these approaches addresses a genuine weakness in the existing architecture. The decolonisation agenda addresses legitimacy. Global Public Investment addresses collective action. South-South cooperation addresses dependency. Rules reform addresses structural inequality. Together they have moved the debate well beyond recurring declarations that aid is dead.

Yet solving these problems does not automatically solve the problem of solidarity.

The Unresolved Question

The emerging alternatives differ in important ways, but they share a common feature. Their political appeal often rests on interests that extend beyond moral obligation alone.

This is particularly visible in debates around global public goods. The political case for climate finance, pandemic preparedness, biodiversity protection, or financial stability derives partly from the fact that their consequences cannot be contained within national borders. Cooperation becomes politically attractive because vulnerability is shared. The same logic often underpins arguments for regional cooperation, migration governance, and economic stability.

This feature is not a weakness. Indeed, it may be one of the greatest strengths of emerging approaches. Traditional aid has often struggled to maintain political support precisely because it relied heavily on appeals to moral responsibility. Architectures linked to shared interests and shared risks may prove more resilient.

But, what if the ones that are suffering most are not visible, not posing a risk, not of strategic interest for the ones holding most of the resources? Why has climate finance historically gone disproportionately to middle-income countries where emissions reductions are largest or cheapest, with low-income countries receiving only 7% of total climate finance in 2024 . Why are countries with lowest income and most in need, the first victims of aid reductions asks Rueda-Sabater ? Is this because their needs generate no strategic imperative for those making the decisions on where to spend and where to cut? And why did a Loss and damage mechanisms take so long to materialise? 

What the above seems to suggest is that GPG-cooperation happens when powerful actors perceive direct consequences for themselves, but this does not mean that it automatically protects the most vulnerable groups, countries, regions. Climate action only gained political momentum when climate change became recognised as a global threat. Pandemic preparedness surged after COVID-19 demonstrated the costs of inaction. Financial stability attracts attention because instability travels rapidly across borders. But what happens when suffering is severe yet politically invisible? What happens when vulnerability generates neither strategic advantages nor systemic risks for those controlling resources?

The challenge therefore runs deeper than institutional design. It concerns the political foundations of solidarity itself.

Historically, durable systems of redistribution have rarely emerged from moral commitments alone. Welfare states were built through political coalitions, collective identities, labour movements, and shared understandings of membership and obligation. Citizens accepted redistribution because they perceived themselves as belonging to a common political community.

International cooperation lacks many of these foundations. There is no global electorate, no global citizenship, and only limited mechanisms through which distant populations can generate political accountability. International solidarity therefore exists in a structurally more fragile political environment than domestic solidarity.

This observation sharpens the significance of Alonso’s geostrategic analysis. The question is not simply whether alternative institutions can be designed. It is whether the political conditions necessary to sustain solidarity are becoming stronger or weaker. Under conditions of geopolitical rivalry, transactional bargaining, and nationalist retrenchment, commitments towards vulnerable populations may become increasingly difficult to maintain. Institutions can channel political will, but they cannot manufacture it.

The unresolved question is therefore not whether alternatives exist. They do. Nor is it whether these alternatives address important weaknesses in the aid system. They clearly do. The unresolved question is whether international solidarity can be institutionalised independently of strategic interest – and if not, how to build the most robust possible protection for those whose vulnerability is disconnected from strategic risk.

This is why the future of international cooperation ultimately depends on the future of international solidarity. The challenge is not merely to design better mechanisms for transferring resources, providing public goods, or reforming global governance. It is to sustain political commitments towards people whose welfare may never align neatly with the interests of those holding power.

That challenge has never been fully solved. Development cooperation was one attempt to address it. The emerging alternatives represent others. Whether they succeed will depend not only on institutional innovation but on the political and normative foundations of solidarity itself.

The question facing the post-aid debate is therefore not simply what comes after aid. It is whether the political will to protect the most vulnerable – those whose suffering generates no strategic advantage for those in power – can be built, sustained, and institutionalised.

Nadia Molenaers is associate professor at the Institute of Development Policy (IOB) at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her research focuses on the political economy of aid, donor-recipient interactions, conditionalities and sanctions.

Image: CJMM on Pixabay

Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the EADI Debating Development Blog or the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes