Reframing the Development Project for the Twenty-First Century

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Nancy Birdsall delivered this speech at the Conference on Building Our Common Future, sponsored by the UK Department for International Development on March 11, 2009.

Excerpt:

"It is time to put aside the 20th-century conception of the development project as primarily about charity or aid from rich to poor nations. The global economic crisis illustrates that we live in what is now an interdependent global system, in which the prosperity and security of people in the rich world can no longer be guaranteed within rich countries’ own sovereign borders. It is not just the economic crisis that clarifies this interdependence, including that of the world’s rich minority on the capability and welfare of the world’s poor majority: the problem of climate change, for instance, cannot be managed by the rich world alone, nor, for that matter, can the risk of global pandemics or the challenge to social order of cross-border corruption, drug trafficking, and illegitimate tax flight."