What Should(n’t) Global Development Advocates Advocate For?

I couldn’t run a successful global development advocacy campaign if Taylor Swift and Lionel Messi offered to front it. I admire groups and movements like Make Poverty History, the Jubilee Debt Campaign, and ONE that actually know what they are doing in that space and have achieved great results. But, with that major caveat, I am worried that the trillions in spending that global development advocates are being asked to advocate for of late is beyond the capacities of the most skilled mobilizers and influencers. It may be setting them up for failure. 

Advocates played vital roles in helping to raise billions for causes including HIV treatment and debt relief. For example, the Jubilee 2000 campaign is associated with over $85 billion in additional debt relief to the world’s poorest countries over the course of the 2000s (worth about 0.4 percent of the OECD’s GDP at the time). PEPFAR may have been the initial brainchild of President George Bush and his advisors, but advocacy helped make it as big and vital as it has been in turning the tide on the global AIDS crisis. The impact in terms of lives saved and improved is simply immense.

But now advocates are being asked to up their game, to deliver on trillions each year for development rather than the annual flow of billions delivered for HIV drugs or the one-off stock reduction in tens of billions in debt. A line like “two percent for people and planet” suggests about $1.2 trillion a year from OECD countries, for example.

I’d love to see the world providing more than a trillion a year in high quality development finance. I think it could achieve remarkable things for the planet. But I'm not sure the ask is going to work, not least because it is simply a historically unprecedented amount. It's a historically unprecedented time to be sure, but not one that appears amenable to massive increases in development finance. If advocacy works well when it seeks billions to achieve a goal that billions can go a long way to achieving, I worry it won’t work as well when seeking orders of magnitude more finance to achieve goals where that financing is only a comparatively small part.

“Development” goals have grown bigger…

The Jubilee debt relief seemed implausible at the start. Many economists suggested PEPFAR was going to fund too little of the wrong stuff. And in their time, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) seemed pretty ambitious. The costings for the MDGs (with all of their faults) estimated to meet them would have involved around $50 billion a year in spending. But, still, there were only eight of them, and they were comparatively targeted on basic development.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals are significantly more wide ranging and, within many of the goals, call for progress over 15 years that is unprecedented in its rapidity and extent. And we’ve added further to the development targets (and related financing asks) with demands for the rapid global adoption of zero-carbon technologies. Put together the health and education spending, the calls for universal infrastructure access, and rapid progress toward low-carbon development, and the result has been targets for $3.5 trillion in additional annual spending by 2030 in developing countries outside of China, of which it is estimated $1 trillion would need to come from external sources. That is quite a lot.

But they aren’t primarily about public international finance…

For a lot of the SDGs, the lack of international finance is far from the greatest barrier to achievement. Awesome levels of domestic policy reform would be required, and there is little sense it is being delivered. Universal access to education and health services takes people to deliver them—who can’t be trained overnight. Delivering universal access to infrastructure takes building and maintaining it—a serious technical challenge again requiring people who aren’t there. Sustainably running all of those investments takes financial systems—as would any attempt to end poverty through transfers, which would also take data on targeting we don’t (yet) have. The extent of the transformation underpinning universal achievement of the SDGs would involve economic and institutional development that usually takes decades, not six years.

Meanwhile, climate finance is a chimera made of two very different animals: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation finance is a marginal force for greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction, where the battle will be won or lost by technology advance and demand in the world’s richer countries. Eighty percent of GHG emissions are concentrated in high- and upper-middle-income countries. Take the US as an example: the money from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that isn’t used to prop up inefficient American manufacturing firms might well help reduce emissions, and it is one or two orders of magnitude larger than plausible levels of international climate finance from the US. 

Probably the biggest things that the Biden administration has done to impact mitigation in the rest of the world are, first, using subsidies including through the IRA to help technology advances scale domestically, hopefully reducing the long-term cost of net zero goals in other countries even if at the short-term cost of diverting investment interest from particular projects in those countries; second, juicing the US economy while limiting immigration, causing inflation and subsequent interest rate increases that made renewable energy investment less attractive worldwide; and third, starting a global trade war with China that will increase the average global price of zero carbon technologies as it reduces supply (but may, hopefully, also lead to a Chinese “Marshall Plan” where China offloads excess supply of zero carbon technologies on developing countries at bargain basement prices). Compared to that, the non-delivery of US climate finance is likely a distant fourth.

The climate adaptation battle is a part of the broader development struggle. Low-income countries see death rates from natural disasters that are tenfold or more those of high-income countries. Adaptation is about irrigation and new crops in agriculture and moving a lot of people out of that agriculture to more climate-resilient occupations, it is about air conditioning and cool housing options and the electricity to support that and so on. Broad-based development is the only way to realistically deliver on the multiple components of an adaptation strategy. And we’ve seen broad-based development is about a lot more than international finance.

So, the difference in advocating for many hundreds of billions a year in development and climate finance and advocating for a one-off $100 billion in debt relief isn’t only one of scale, it is also one of impact. The debt relief was really significant in ending a debt crisis. Meanwhile, we only met one of the eight MDGs despite aid increasing by about $50 billion over their lifetime, and we are not shaping up to do any better with the SDGs. What were extremely ambitious goals over 15 years are surely utterly impossible today, international financing or no. Similarly, even a lot more climate finance would deliver a fairly small part of the solution to a far more wide-ranging problem.

…And (anyway) we aren’t going to get the money

Regardless, we aren’t going to get the money, at home or abroad. To start, the financing calculations suggest we need significantly greater domestic resource mobilization as part of the package. Once again that takes policy reforms and systems that countries do not appear to be putting in place with any great vigor. While the IMF suggests that least developed countries (LDCs) could potentially raise 9 percent of GDP more in tax to cover domestic financing demands, ODI analysis gently suggests this is “unrealistic” and “not a good basis for setting expectations of how much tax a country could raise.” The ODI authors suggest experience points to a sustained annual increase of 0.5 percent in the tax-to-GDP ratio as an ambitious target.

The SDG/climate funding analysis also calls for a massive step-up in private cash to fund infrastructure. But trends in public-private partnerships to deliver infrastructure have been rapidly declining in the SDG era—from $113 billion in 2015 to $86 billion in 2023. Meanwhile, the developing country debt crisis suggests that, for all loans have a vital role to play in global finance, private sector loans to poorer countries in particular come at a high price. And hopes for pension funds and other institutional investors to deploy more of their “dry powder” in LDCs also appear considerably inflated.

When it comes to donor resources to be advocated for, there is no evidence we’re seeing a considerable increase in generosity. The original 0.7 percent aid target came from advocacy and analysis (in that order), suggesting we needed public and private flows worth 1 percent of rich country GDP—with 0.7 percent coming from governments. That target was set in 1958 and likely only thanks to the considerable watering-down in the ODA measure (now covering refugee costs, aid management spending, and other resources that never flow to developing countries) has any country outside of Scandinavia met it since then. The call for $1 trillion a year is—give or take—2 percent of OECD GNI. DAC country programmable aid, the kind of finance envisaged in the early analysis around the 0.7 percent goal, and the kind of finance that would actually help meet SDG and climate goals in developing countries, amounts to $65 billion a year, or closer to 0.1 percent of OECD GNI. Country programmable aid was a lower percentage of OECD GNI in 2021 (the latest year of data) than 2012. And overall ODA to LDCs has stagnated in absolute terms since 2011.

Advocates have played an important role in pushing capital adequacy reforms at the multilateral development banks and allocations of Special Drawing Rights at the IMF that have the potential to unlock hundreds of billions in financing. Nonetheless, the World Bank’s IDA replenishment negotiations are providing a further reality check. The hopeful scenario is that donors pitch in enough to ensure that IDA is only slightly less generous over the next three years than it was in the last few years. Meanwhile, regarding climate finance, nearly all that has been provided has used ODA, and given the overall picture regarding ODA it is hard to make the case that appeals to the climate crisis have unlocked new levels of generosity.

The existing $100 billion climate target, achieved with the help of advocacy, also points to risks in advocating for a lot of money without worrying about quality: you can get the easiest, least effective, most destructive bit of what can be delivered. Focusing on a $100 billion number with no quality control, what we got was a mess of rebadged, repurposed, low-impact assistance. Surely there is a risk that if you ask for 2 percent, what you’ll end up getting is the worst possible 0.5 percent?

Under the circumstances, the benefit of conversations based around “if we were to meet these goals (which we will not meet), we would have spent this much money (which we will not get)” may have reached their useful limit.

What does this mean for advocacy?

There seems to be some agreement in the academic literature on advocacy that success benefits from the joint occurrence of mobilization, support from political allies, and favorable public opinion. Advocacy for global development sometimes enjoys a confluence of the first two, and it often struggles with the third—and in particular when it comes to increasing international financial flows. Asking for a tenfold increase in financing at a point where political allies appear to be on the back foot seems like a stretch. At the same time, advocacy can and should play an important role in reframing discussions, and it won’t work if it is meek. But perhaps there is a middle course.

It is not at all implausible to think tens of billions of dollars in additional high-quality, well-targeted assistance could significantly reduce global $2.15 poverty rates or save hundreds of thousands of lives a year, for example. And that makes me hope development advocates start to campaign for somewhat smaller but still huge things. Perhaps funding malaria eradication is the new PEPFAR. It could even be done through existing organizations including the President’s Malaria Initiative and Gavi, but with accelerated targets and funding goals. It isn’t implausible we could pretty much end $2.15 poverty through a global safety net. Perhaps there could be a campaign around “real assistance”—the stuff that actually delivers investments in developing countries rather than being spent in donor countries. Beyond aid, greater use of IMF gold or tax justice are both important and perhaps plausible mobilization targets. Surely there are other global mid-sized asks with potentially massive returns.

I wouldn’t have forecast the Jubilee campaign would achieve what it did, nor that PEPFAR would grow so big. I hope I’m underestimating the power of advocacy again. But precisely because it has been so successful at helping to deliver such important outcomes, I’d love to know it is focusing on achievable targets.