Photo: Jon Tyson/Unsplash
This is a blog post written by Aram Ziai, Professor of Development and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kassel in Germany. It was originally published on the 13th of May 2025 on the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI).
In the last few months, our object of research has seen some dramatic changes. I am referring to the de-facto dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) after the inauguration of President trump in January 2025. The USA has been by far the largest donor of Official Development Assistance (ODA) during the past decades (although in relation to its GDP it has been among the less generous). In February 2025, the Trump administration has announced to eliminate more than 90% of USAID’s foreign aid contracts and 60 billion US-$ in assistance.
Furthermore, almost the entire direct-hire staff of USAID was placed on leave. There were waivers for military financing of Israel and Egypt, for emergency food assistance and emergency humanitarian aid. Also, the USA stopped funding and withdrew from the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) (amidst what is seen as a potential genocide by the International Court of Justice), the UN Human Rights Council and all organisations that support abortions or provide related information, while funding for other UN agencies is being reviewed. Furthermore, the Minister Counselor to the UN Economic and Social Council of the new government announced that the Agenda 2030 and the SDGs ‘advance a program of soft global governance that is inconsistent with U.S. sovereignty and adverse to the rights and interests of Americans’ (Heartney 2025). Together with the plans to forcibly align any remaining aid with US national security and economic interests, this amounts to a ‘seismic shift in how the US approaches global development’.
And Trump is certainly not alone: accompanying the shift to the political right in many countries is a stress on national interest (‘America first’ – in everyday megalomania the nation state is conflated with the continent – and similar slogans). The conservative/social democrat coalition government in Germany is far more moderate and affirms its will to engage in multilateral development cooperation. Neither does it renounce the SDGs as a conspiracy by green elites to lead the world into ecocommunism, like some politicians from the German right-wing party AfD – which some conservatives already propose to treat like a normal democratic party. Nevertheless, the new coalition announced that regarding ‘our interests’, its strategic focus in development policy will lie in economic cooperation and securing access to raw materials, in fighting the causes of flight and in energy cooperation. In comparison to the former government, national interest should also clearly play a larger role in development cooperation.
So the conservatives in Germany want development policy to be closer intertwined with the national interest, but at least they do not want to abolish it like those in the USA. The consequences of dismantling USAID are dramatic, especially regarding the support of the health sector in many countries and this must not be relativized. Yet from the perspective of discourse analysis it can be observed that the insistence on development cooperation serving the national interest is shared even by progressives. In Germany, social democratic ministers for development cooperation have usually adopted a more progressive policy but designated it as serving an ‘enlightened self-interest’: in a globalizing world, poverty and crises in the global South would also affect the global North through migration, climate change or terrorism.
While geopolitical and economic interests were dominant in the founding of development cooperation, decades of co-opting criticism and several cycles of the promise of ‘development’ have led e.g. to participation, sustainability and empowerment also becoming the objectives of aid projects. So while geopolitical and economic interests have by no means disappeared from development cooperation (the plans for a massive hydrogen project in Namibia designed to cater for Germany’s energy needs being a case in point), other objectives increasingly play a role in development cooperation. And they have been a source of irritation for the political right, which e.g. scandalized the German financing of cycle paths in Peru.
Apparently tangible benefits for German companies selling turbines for dams seem more convincing in terms of serving the national interests than the argument that preventing global warming through creating alternatives to auto-mobility would serve the same cause. Of course, from a poststructuralist perspective it is impossible to say that one project does and another does not serve the national interest, in both cases it is a discursive construction.
Still, the enlightened self-interest has its problems. If ‘we’ should help the poor in order not to face consequences in the form of migration or terrorism, there are always alternatives to protect ‘us’ in the form of stricter border controls and immigration laws. Also, the old idea that there is no contradiction between poverty reduction and profitable investments – promoted at least since Truman – has in practice often turned out to be misleading, as even recent World Bank research on public-private partnerships had to admit. But most of all it will be difficult to achieve a globally just world if we concede that politics legitimately consists of pursuing the interest of ‘our’ nation state (or allegedly its citizens) against the interests of other nation states and their citizens.
Now the Trump administration obviously has opted for a more extreme version of pursuing the national interest by dismantling USAID. Contrary to Sumner and Klingebiel, I would argue that this does not amount to a “new approach to global development’, but simply to a new approach to ‘development aid’, and of course one that does not care a whim about global solidarity, let alone climate justice and reparations for colonialism. Yet that ‘development’ consists of achieving a state of society which by and large resembles the existing technologically most advanced capitalist societies, and that it can be approached through the hegemonic models of the economy, politics and knowledge, is a claim that Trump would most likely not object to. Yet this is the claim questioned by Post-Development (PD) critique.
As this critique has at times also demanded the abolition of development aid, a journalist recently asked me whether (regarding USAID) the right-wing has now captured a left-wing demand. The answer is no. Of course the abolition of development aid has been a demand of neoliberals since the 1960s, as it would lead to inefficiency, corruption, false incentives etc. Yet from the PD perspective the abolition of development aid has been envisioned as part of a larger transformation of social and economic models. To leave global capitalism untouched and simply cut all aid is therefore not a progressive strategy. Even if it was directed against white saviourism, it would mean removing the one policy field where at least some projects are designed to ameliorate global inequality while leaving intact the economic machine that generates wealth and misery in gargantuan proportions.
The humanitarian NGO medico international has adopted a three-pronged strategy towards humanitarian aid: to defend it, to criticize it, and to overcome it. I propose to adopt a similar perspective regarding development cooperation: 1) to defend it (at least those of its elements which contribute to empowerment, equality and freedom of marginalised people) against its right-wing critics because it does not let go of the ideal of global justice, 2) to criticize it for its relation to geopolitical and economic interests, its Eurocentrism and its authoritarian elements, 3) to overcome it in favour of less Eurocentric, more democratic, ecological and just approaches to dealing with global inequality and the attempt to achieve a good life for all the people on this earth.
In the current constellation of forces where nationalism, authoritarianism and fascism are on the rise, it seems to me that despite all the necessary criticism of development cooperation, progressive actors should not neglect the first part of the strategy.
Note: The text will appear in a slightly modified version as an afterword to the second edition of Development Discourse and Global History. From Colonialism to the SDGs (Routledge).
