What to Play Next: Rethinking Development Today

Heiner Janus and Michael Roll argue that the largest aid contraction on record coincides with a reopened decades-old fault line: what “development” means, who it serves — and how the field can reinvent itself for what comes next.

Manchester embodies reinvention like few other places. It built the world’s first industrial economy, watched it rust, and recast itself as the capital of England’s north. When protests turned deadly at the Peterloo massacre, it helped galvanise a tradition of organised labour and democratic reform — one that later produced the suffragettes, founded there by Emmeline Pankhurst. And when Joy Division collapsed, the remaining members re-emerged as New Order. That instinct — not to reassemble what broke but to build something new — was the animating spirit when the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute convened researchers in mid-April to ask: is the era of Development over? And if so, what replaces it?

The question is sharpened by recent events. According to preliminary OECD data, official development assistance by DAC members fell by 23.1 percent from 2024 to 2025, the largest annual contraction on record, bringing aid back to where it stood when the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted in 2015. The SDGs themselves, once billed as a universal aspiration, have been formally denounced by Washington at the United Nations General Assembly. Yet the upheaval is not just institutional. It has reopened a fault line that has run through the concept of “development” from the start: what the term actually means and who it refers to.

Two distinctions matter. The first is between big-D Development, the organised international project of aid agencies, multilateral institutions, and global goal-setting, and small-d development, the messy, nationally driven process of economic and social transformation that has always owed more to domestic politics than to foreign assistance. The dismantling of the former does not necessarily halt the latter. The second distinction concerns geography. Is development a universal process, occurring in Manchester, Mumbai and Mombasa alike, or does it describe a specific relationship between richer and poorer parts of the world? The conference confronted both questions, and the answers offered little comfort.

The opening plenary dispensed with the notion that this crisis is a temporary disruption. Lee Jones of Queen Mary University argued that we are witnessing a “second Cold War” — not a systemic battle between rival ideologies, as in the first, but a positional struggle within globalised capitalism, where the pillars of the neoliberal order are being pulled apart from the inside. The implications he drew were blunt: the multilateral system is unlikely to survive in its current form, major powers are converging on a miserly approach to development spending, and what remains will be “small-d development” — capitalist integration through reworked value chains, constrained to strategically relevant geographies. National security and economic competition will trump poverty reduction and climate action.

Yuen Yuen Ang of Johns Hopkins University drew a sharper conclusion. The “polycrisis,” she argued, is paralysing only for those attached to the old order. No society has ever escaped poverty through aid or randomised controlled trials. The era of aid dependence is ending, and the spread of universal institutions has ground to a halt. For the global majority, which has never been the producer of the dominant development paradigm, this represents what she calls a “polytunity”: an opening to redefine development itself, away from assimilation and mimicry and toward what she terms an adaptive, inclusive, and moral political economy.

If Jones and Ang diagnosed a paradigm in collapse, Daniela Gabor, SOAS University of London, examined the financial architecture being built in its place. Her concept of the “Wall Street consensus” describes a world where development has been recast as an investible asset class: states de-risk while private capital extracts. The Lake Turkana wind farm in Kenya served as her case in point, a project assembled through a patchwork of dozens of financial agencies that ended up owned by BlackRock, structured in a way she called fundamentally anti-developmental. She pointed to fossil fuel subsidies rolled out in response to rising energy prices, and donor agencies bluntly subsidising domestic companies, as variations on the same theme.

The Wall Street consensus, Gabor argued, is a weak strategy of American hegemony for three reasons: it is not fast enough, not just enough, and not stable enough. Even the World Bank’s renewed interest in industrial policy amounts to little more than subsidising private capital with public money. In closing, she called for a new state-coordinated developmentalism — one that covers all states and combines industrial policy with decarbonisation.

The sharpest challenge to the current development cooperation system came from Ken Opalo of Georgetown University, who opened the second day by accusing the development community of navel-gazing. The sky has not fallen in most low-income countries, he argued, and the pathologies of aid dependency may mean its decline is less catastrophic than the sector assumes. The SDGs, in his telling, represent the lowest common denominator imaginable: any education minister merely parroting SDGs is not thinking about context, and without context, policy outruns the capacity to implement it. His prescription was a pivot from “nano-development,” meaning small, tightly measured interventions, to national development and the proactive use of policy autonomy: context-specific knowledge production, support for local priorities rather than donor-driven faddism, and honest conversations about how European trade and environmental policies actively harm the countries they claim to help.

The closing plenary surfaced the underlying tension. “Development” is becoming a dirty word, observed one participant working in a development agency. Partners find it patronising; within five years it may no longer function as a policy category. Another colleague noted that geopolitics had dominated the conference at the expense of other forms of politics, and that the return to thinking in terms of national development risks ignoring the inequalities within states that development studies had spent decades trying to illuminate. The field is being asked to reopen debates it thought it had closed. Whether development studies can survive without big-D Development remains an open question. The field’s fragmentation and its uncertain institutional footing suggest that muddling through is not an option.

Yet there is a counterweight that has been overlooked: bureaucratic inertia itself. Research on how officials in development agencies behave suggests that career bureaucrats are driven less by ideology than by institutional incentives — blame avoidance, risk aversion, and the desire to keep programmes running. These instincts are usually treated as pathologies. They often are. But in a period of erratic political disruption, they also act as a brake. Bureaucratic routines absorb and dissipate radical policy shifts. Budget lines survive reorganisations; institutions outlast the politicians who threaten to abolish them. None of this defends the status quo. But it does mean that the window for reinvention may be wider than the rhetoric of crisis suggests. The machinery slows the demolition, buying time for those willing to design what comes next.

Manchester knows something about that. Development studies at the university began in the late 1950s as a training centre for “overseas administrators.” Over the following decades it was rebuilt, first into a research institute, then into the Global Development Institute — now one of Europe’s largest centres for the study of development. A key leader in this transformation was David Hulme, the institute’s long-serving executive director, who retires this year. The conference closed with a standing ovation in his honour — a reminder that institutions, like cities, are shaped by people willing to keep innovating. The development community now faces the same test. The raw material for reinvention exists. As any member of New Order could confirm, the hardest part is not letting go. It is deciding what to play next.

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Heiner Janus is a Project Lead and Senior Researcher at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), where he leads a research project on the effectiveness of development policy.

Michael Roll is a Project Lead and Senior Researcher at IDOS, where he works on the governance of urban sustainability transformations in the Transformative Urban Coalitions (TUC) project.

Photo by Austin Garcia from Pexels