By Iliana Olivié, Antonio Sianes, María Santillán O’Shea, Gustavo Cadenas Delascio, Adam Timothy Mayemba and Matthew Winkler / Shaping Sustainable Futures conference series
Development finance is increasingly taking place between worlds. It is expected to reconcile goals that are often in tension: preserving multilateralism while accommodating more flexible coalitions of the willing; responding to shrinking official development assistance (ODA) while mobilising larger volumes of public and private finance; and adapting to a shifting balance of power between North and South while responding to long-standing calls to decolonise international partnerships.
These are not isolated trends but interconnected transformations that are reshaping the financing for development (FfD) agenda. As a result, the challenge is no longer simply to mobilise more resources. It is also to rethink the conceptual foundations of development finance and identify new ways of translating evolving principles into effective action.
Against this backdrop, the session on “Financing Global Development in a Changing World ”, at the latest EADI General Conference explored how the FfD agenda can respond to an increasingly fragmented and contested international landscape. It began by examining the broader global context before narrowing its focus to specific regions and sectors.
With a full house (36 participants!) despite the heat wave, the conversation navigated the tensions and dilemmas surrounding FfD. Development paradigms are shifting, partly explaining the gap between ideas and actions. Another explanation is that aid is not immune to political dynamics, just like any other public policy domain; something that may also explain its recent decline.
Shifting paradigms
With a discourse analysis of the UN’s Financing for Development (FfD) agenda, articulated through its four FfD conferences held between 2002 and 2025, María Santillán O’Shea showed that the international political consensus has considered development to be increasingly multidimensional over the last twenty years. What was predominantly an economic agenda at the beginning of the century has progressively become a multidimensional one, with the environmental and sustainable facets of development, long documented in scholarly production, becoming more rooted in political consensus around the Addis Ababa conference in 2015.
Parallelly, more political focus has been gradually placed on the structural causes of unequal access to resources and decision-making power across and within countries, as the configuration of actors in these consensus-building and negotiating spaces – and their capacity to influence – have evolved towards greater inclusion of diverse voices. The 2015 Addis Ababa conference signalled a ‘global’ momentum, as development challenges and solutions were considered as globally shared and greater emphasis was placed on inequalities among peoples, rather than countries. This is somewhat reversed at the 2025 Sevilla conference, when an even stronger political acknowledgment of the complexity and interconnectedness of development challenges coexists with a more assertive centrality of national sovereignty as an overarching political principle.
The gap between ideas and action
However, the evolving priorities and commitments have not been fully matched by the implementation strategies of bilateral donors and multilateral organisations. Take the billions-to-trillions promise made at FfD3, back in 2015. It has yet to materialise.
Sure, international political consensuses guide policy decisions. However, these consensuses are not only forged by ideas, but also by a black box of factors that mediate and affect the consolidation, transmission, take-up and evolution of those ideas. Said factors may partly explain the gap between the emergence and acceptance of scholarly ideas and the timing and manner in which they become politically adopted (or not).
What is more, implementation needs also to deal with the institutional complexity of donorship. Still on the billions-to-trillions, the EU’s Global Gateway strategy launched after the pandemic also demands empirical testing. Using European Investment Bank project data from 2014 to 2025, Gustavo Cadenas Delascio applied a difference-in-differences approach to test for financial additionality. The objective was to find out if the initiative delivers more capital, broader sector engagement and private co-financing; or simply repackages existing flows under a new label.
Latin America and the Caribbean served as a natural test case. The region combines infrastructure financing gaps with the institutional depth required for blended finance. It also holds strategic assets like lithium, copper and green hydrogen, making it central to EU supply chain objectives. If the Global Gateway functions as intended, the effects should be observable here.
The data showed no statistically significant effect across investment volume, sectoral diversification or financial leverage, either in LAC or globally. Marginally, the financial multiplier for LAC projects declined post-2022, which indicates a portfolio shift towards lower-leverage sovereign operations, contrary to the catalytic blended finance the instrument outlines.
The primary policy implication is that additionality must be measured rather than assumed. There is a clear friction between the EU political mandate and EIB operational practice. This transmission problem requires institutional attention for the strategy to meet its stated objectives.
Policies versus politics
In addition to the black box in between ideas and political commitments and the institutional challenges in between political commitments and implementation, there are also international political dynamics that affect development cooperation outcomes.
This point emerged clearly in Matthew Winkler’s presentation on climate negotiations. These are usually judged by the texts they produce. His research asks what else they produce such as the bilateral aid relationships formed in the corridors. Linking 238,000 delegate records from the UNFCCC Lists of Participants to bilateral climate aid flows across 33 donors and 141 recipients (2010-2024), he treats COPs and Subsidiary Body sessions as informal “aid marketplaces”, venues where the unusual concentration of donors and recipients lets funding relationships form alongside the formal proceedings.
Matthew found that countries that send larger delegations to these venues are more likely to receive bilateral climate aid, and to receive more of it, with sustained presence over several years doubling these effects. So presence pays, modestly but measurably. And while aid allocation theory rests on need, merit, and donor self-interest, these results imply that there is a fourth element at play, which is recipient engagement.
This suggests an equity paradox, since if showing up shapes who gets funded, and the capacity to show up is unequal, the marketplace may quietly compound the inequalities climate finance seeks to address.
Is this why aid is declining?
This makes at least three short-circuits: the ideas-commitments black box, the gap between commitments and implementation, and the politics dynamics surrounding aid and impacting on the development outcomes. Is this why aid is declining? Perhaps partly. Other factors include competing agendas such as security. Yet this creates a paradox, since decreasing aid could actually undermine the pursuit of national and collective interests.
This point was somehow made by Adam Timothy Mayemba for the particular case of Uganda and the global health agenda. His presentation examined how declining external financing – particularly reductions in major donor funding – creates significant risks for sustaining HIV services in refugee hosting areas. Funding gaps have contributed to reduced HIV prevention and outreach activities, shortages of health workers, and increasing pressure on health systems, with potential consequences for treatment continuity and health outcomes.
Moreover, Adam’s presentation took us back to where the session had started: on the one hand, the complexity and multidimensionality of development, and, on the other, the need to look at the whole of the FfD toolbox, beyond aid. HIV outcomes are closely linked to socioeconomic resilience. Refugees experience high levels of unemployment and poverty, limiting treatment adherence and increasing vulnerability to HIV infection. Strengthening livelihoods through vocational skills, entrepreneurship, and economic inclusion complements investments in health systems by improving household resilience and supporting long-term treatment adherence. Evidence from ongoing health system strengthening initiatives further demonstrates that investments in quality healthcare, referral systems, and workforce capacity enhance service delivery for refugees. Adam’s study concluded that sustainable HIV responses require a transition from donor-dependent approaches towards integrated financing models that combine domestic resource mobilisation, resilient health systems, and livelihood interventions.
The panel ultimately showed that financing for development is no longer simply about mobilising more resources. It is about understanding how changing ideas, political incentives and institutional arrangements interact to determine where finance goes, how it is used and what impact it ultimately has.
PhD in Economics, Iliana Olivié is a Senior Fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute and Associate Professor in the Department of Applied and Structural Economics and History at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she teaches postgraduate courses in economic analysis and development. Since 2023, she is also Director of the European Think Tanks Group (ETTG). Iliana works on the global development agendas, European aid policies, international development finance and the relations of the EU with the Global South. She has taken part in over 30 national and international research projects and has more than 200 publications, including academic articles, books, book chapters, policy reports and policy-oriented articles.
Antonio Sianes is the Head of the Research Institute on Policies for Social Transformation at Universidad Loyola de Andalucía, where he serves as Professor in the Department of International Relations. As a scholar, he focuses on global governance and the international development regime, examining how global policies, institutions, and frameworks influence development on an international scale and how they can be improved for more equitable and sustainable outcomes at the local level. He has published several academic works in this field.
María Santillán O’Shea is a Research Fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute and the Institute’s contact point in the European Think Tanks Group (ETTG), as well as PhD candidate in Economics at the Complutense University of Madrid. BSc in Politics and International Relations from the University of Exeter, and MSc Public Policy and Human Development with a Social Protection Policy specialization from the United Nations University-MERIT and Maastricht University. Her research focuses on the financing for development agenda and changing global development agendas and European development cooperation policies. She previously worked as a Research Executive in the Public Division of Kantar UK and as a Research Analyst at TotalAnalysis.
Gustavo Cadenas Delascio is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD Fellow at the University of Oslo’s Centre for Global Sustainability. His research uses mixed methods to examine the financial architecture of the EU’s Global Gateway strategy in Latin America and the Caribbean, situating it within the region’s political economy and the broader reconfiguration of development finance.
Adam Timothy Mayemba is a Ugandan Monitoring and Evaluation professional with over 12 years of experience in Research, Results Based Management, Program Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning and Knowledge Management. His experience in MEL spans diverse sectors, including enterprise and entrepreneurship development, agriculture, sustainable tourism, social protection, green and decent work, TVET and skills development, livelihoods, institutional strengthening, and legal aid.
Matthew Winkler is a PhD candidate in International Relations at Sciences Po’s Center for International Studies (CERI) in Paris, under the supervision of Carola Klöck. His research examines how recipient countries’ diplomatic engagement at UNFCCC climate negotiations shapes the allocation of bilateral climate aid, combining panel analysis of aid flows with elite interviews of negotiators and policymakers in donor and recipient countries.
Image: Tanja Tepavak on Unsplash
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