The international development landscape has changed dramatically over the past two years. Major cuts to aid budgets, intensifying geopolitical competition, a growing number of violent conflicts, and mounting pressure on multilateralism have accelerated questions about the future of development cooperation. At the time of shrinking public budgets, growing scepticism about aid, and an increasingly fragmented geopolitical environment, and after two years of intensive debate on the future of development cooperation, leaders now need to build a system that can command political support, forge new partnerships, and deliver results in a fundamentally changed world.
Against this backdrop, development leaders will gather in Madrid on 28–29 October for the 2026 Development Leaders Conference (DLC), co-hosted by the Center for Global Development (CGD) and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID). Over nine years, the DLC has brought together senior officials from bilateral and multilateral development cooperation organisations and experts from the Global North and South for a private annual gathering away from the day-to-day pressures to discuss the challenges they are facing and the changes they have implemented over the past year.
Ahead of the meeting, we look at how the development cooperation landscape has shifted since leaders last gathered and how those changes will shape the discussions in Madrid.
Almost immediately after last year’s conference in Hamburg, the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) took place in Seville, providing an important forum for reassessing how development is financed and how the international system must evolve. The Future of Development Cooperation Coalition, co-hosted by CGD and the African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET), has taken that conversation further and, in a series of regional consultations, brought together diverse perspectives on what development cooperation, its purpose and priorities, should look like.
These discussions will provide a starting point for our discussions in Madrid, as participants take stock of how different actors have responded to current challenges, look into the future, and discuss what these changes could mean for the development cooperation in the years ahead. One central question will be how development finance should evolve. Many donor governments are increasingly making the case for development spending in terms of national interest—linked to security, economic resilience, migration, or strategic influence. This is in an effort to sustain political support for international engagement.
Such an approach raises difficult questions about whose interests development cooperation ultimately serves and where genuine mutual interests exist. Drawing on CGD’s work on “a clearer case for aid”, conference participants will consider how to navigate the tensions between development impact, domestic priorities, and investment in global public goods, and will discuss where Official Development Assistance (ODA) can add most value.
The need to make better use of fewer resources is particularly visible in global health. Countries are navigating a complex landscape of funds, initiatives, and institutions at the same time as overall financing is falling. We will explore what a country-responsive global health financing system could look like, and whether fundamental reform is needed.
But rethinking development cooperation is not only about the volume of public investment from donor governments, but how resources are being used. Many partner countries are now middle-income countries, changing the role that external finance can and should play. In Madrid, we will look at what decades of development experience tells us actually works and discuss how development agencies can move beyond traditional financing roles towards supporting innovation, generating and using evidence, and sharing ideas that can improve outcomes at scale. This while also recognising that ODA remains essential in low-income and fragile settings.
We will discuss how development agencies can move beyond their traditional role of finance providers to support evidence generation and innovation at scale. We will then turn to a challenge that is advancing much faster than the traditional policy and evidence cycle: artificial intelligence (AI). Development agencies are already being asked to make decisions about AI investments despite limited evidence available. We will therefore discuss how agencies can make smart bets under uncertainty, support AI ecosystems in low- and middle-income countries, and build procurement and evaluation approaches that are both pragmatic and rigorous.
Across these discussions runs a common thread: what is development cooperation for in today’s world, and how does it need to change to remain effective and credible? Different countries and institutions are responding to today’s challenges in different ways, and one of the strengths of the DLC has always been the opportunity to learn from those differences. As always, we look forward to candid discussions, new ideas, and learning from the experiences of development leaders from across the world. We look forward to sharing what emerges from the discussions in Madrid.
