This policy brief discusses the new geopolitical and geo-economic context and its significance for the Global South and the development policies of Western actors. The systemic confrontation between China and the USA, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but also the seizure of power through a...

In early 2022, Germany's development minister Svenja Schulze announced the adoption of a feminist development policy. With this announcement, Germany joins a growing group of governments that have adopted or declared the adoption of an explicitly feminist perspective in their external policies....

Over the last two decades, national development agencies have committed to results-based approaches and to putting evidence at the centre of their decision-making. For evidence “optimists”, this is a much-needed corrective to past practice; in contrast, “pessimists” worry about ideology...

This Policy Brief examines the geopoliticisation of development cooperation within the Indo-Pacific region. First, we discuss the emergence of Indo-Pacific strategies and how these intersect with geopolitics and development cooperation amongst traditional develop-ment actors such as the United...

Having already been growing in importance for a number of years, geopolitics as it relates to the Global South has become tremendously more relevant following Russia’s aggression in Ukraine in 2022. Rivalries with China are set to become even more influential in future, determining...

For years, German development cooperation (GDC) has been striving to become more results-oriented. In 2022, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) took an important step in this direction by introducing 43 standard indicators. The aim was to aggregate development...

State fragility, which describes how different components of a state do (or do not) function, is a central concept for understanding how development activities and policies in complex political, humanitarian and conflict-affected contexts will (or will not) work in practice. Using fragility as a...