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...

Aid fragmentation is widely denounced, though recent studies suggest potential benefits. To reconcile these mixed findings, we make a case for studying differences across aid sectors and levels of analysis. Our cross-national time-series analysis of data from 141 countries suggests aid...

The concept and mainstream approaches of development cooperation (DC) have been criticised since the early beginning of their existence. Post-development (PD) scholars have been criticising international DC since 1990 for both its Western perspective and the lack of reflection on asymmetrical...

The worldwide wave of autocratization is doing away with many of the democratic achievements made since 1989. Scholarship on international democracy promotion is yet to theorise how democracy can be protected from autocratization. Such a theory must account for different democratic and...

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...

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...

The present collection of short papers is an experimental, explorative and introspective German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) project on international and transnational cooperation for development and sustainability. It is the product of internal brainstorming discussions at...