This October, representatives from the development agencies of nine countries—Australia, Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, Türikye, and the UAE—met in Seoul, South Korea for the fourth in-person meeting of the Rethinking Development Cooperation Working Group. The two-day meeting, which was held alongside the 18th Seoul ODA Conference, the 2025 Busan Partnership Forum, and the MIKTA Foreign Minister’s Meeting, provided an opportunity to explore how agencies are responding to the financial and political challenges that have reshaped the development landscape over the past year.
In this blog, we recount the RDC’s discussion on navigating the changing development landscape and extrapolate three main approaches—engaging in triangular cooperation, leveraging networks and relationships within multilateral organizations, and exploring ways to engage with private finance. Underlying each is a common attempt to better leverage the resources available across the development system to enhance impact through partnership.
Development agencies are facing pressures on budgets and questions over public support for development
Most RDC participants are grappling with similar pressures on their development budgets. For many OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) member agencies, budget cuts have become the norm, reflecting both a lack of fiscal space and shifting political priorities. Several non-DAC members reported facing the same trend—either because their own outward cooperation budgets have been reduced or because cuts by major providers, including the closure of USAID, have diminished the cooperation they rely on as dual provider-recipient countries.
For some agencies, thesefiscal pressures are accompanied by a reorientation of the purposes of development cooperation, with governments increasingly directing funds toward national interest objectives, such as curbing migration. For others, responding to urgent and protracted crises in neighboring regions is continuing to absorb a growing share of development budgets, forcing agencies to make tough choices about how to balance limited budgets against competing priorities.
Many RDC members are also facing declining public support for development. Notably, we heard that USAID’s closure had the dual effect of deepening domestic scrutiny of development spending, while also drawing greater attention to development cooperation—and to national development efforts—in countries where USAID funding was withdrawn. As a result, many RDC members are grappling with a common challenge: how to effectively communicate the value of development to their taxpayers
Three approaches for navigating the changing development landscape
In response to such pressures, most RDC agencies have been re-thinking how to make the best use of the resources available across the development ecosystem:
- Engaging in triangular cooperation as a way of stretching the value of development finance by pooling resources and knowledge across participating partners to achieve better results. While working with multiple partners may raise the costs of coordination, access to specialized regional or sectoral knowledge and the lower human resource cost of working through non-DAC actors could be more efficient for financing partners than working alone. It also allows for building mutually beneficial partnerships across a diverse network of actors.
- Leveraging diplomatic networks and relationships within multilateral organizations to advance the development agenda. While RDC participants value multilateral approaches, some expressed difficulties engaging through multilaterals—either because resources have been diverted to offset USAID cuts in strategic regions, leaving less for multilateral channels, or because of domestic policies that limit voluntary contributions to multilateral agencies.
- Leveraging private funding to help fill the funding gap left by USAID and other major cooperation providers. While these efforts remain in their early phases, philanthropies themselves have warned that the void left by USAID goes beyond funding to the role of government leadership, legitimacy, and expertise, that cannot easily be filled. Engaging the private sector was also mentioned as a strategy being pursued cautiously, especially given past failures to mobilize private finance to the scale envisioned in the “billions to trillions” agenda.
Partnerships are becoming more important, but challenges remain
Each of the three approaches relies on a shared principle—that making the most of the limited budgets means moving beyond solo or siloed action to leverage the range of skills, knowledge, and resources available across the development ecosystem. Doing so allows providers to build approaches that build on the comparative strengths of diverse actors to drive action towards the Sustainable Development Goals. Indeed, the recent outcome document of the 4th Financing for Development Forum commits to collaborating meaningfully with various stakeholders as a way to achieve a shared vision for the future of development finance.
While there is broad agreement that partnerships are necessary for advancing the development agenda, working together is not always easy. At a minimum, partnership requires coordination—an investment of staff time to build mutual understanding, rapport, and the trust needed to create space for meaningful collaboration. Such costs come even before the practical work of aligning processes and avoiding duplication. Historically, coordination itself has proven difficult in development, not least because the incentive for development agencies to work bilaterally to maintain visibility and influence is strong. In today’s landscape, where provider governments increasingly prioritize the national interest as a driver of development, there are questions about how agencies will balance competitive pressures for visibility with the potential value partnerships offer taxpayers through deeper impact.
The RDC as a starting point for collaboration?
If partnerships are the currency of the next phase of development, then spaces that allow for building trust between potential allies will grow in value in the years ahead. So too will those that bring together actors beyond the usual suspects; joining development agencies with philanthropy, civil society, and the private sector. While the RDC is modest in size, it offers a useful platform for building meaningful connections among actors that have had limited prior engagement.
As the group continues to strengthen its work, we look forward to engaging with a wider range of partners—including those from philanthropy and the private sector—to exchange insights, explore effective approaches, and create new opportunities to collaborate in support of sustainable development.
