Debt, development finance, and global agency – David McNair

You are listening to In Pursuit of Development with Dan Bannick. It is increasingly difficult these days to escape the sense that global development is being shaped by a sustained and intensifying state of crisis. And public debate is often framed through narratives of decline. Multiple shocks now overlap from conflict and climate change to health emergencies and mounting debt distress. Add a cost of living squeeze and political incentives are being reshaped across regions. Taken together, these pressures are not merely economic. They are in fact deeply political. Trust in institutions has eroded and aid budgets are being reduced or quietly reallocated under new domestic and geopolitical pressures. And that shift is not abstract. It becomes actually visible in one of the most basic measures of human security, namely whether people have enough to eat. On a planet that is producing more food per person than ever before, it is a moral stain that so many still suffer malnutrition or face the risk of famine. If the sharp drop in global humanitarian funding continues, the risk will intensify. Funding has already fallen from $37 billion in 2024 to $21 billion in 2025. The consequences will be felt most acutely in the neglected food crises across Africa, South Asia and Central America. But here lies the paradox. Over the last two decades, we've also lived through what can fairly be described as an age of extraordinary progress. Child mortality fell dramatically. Extreme poverty declined in large parts of the world. Global life expectancy rose until very recently. Those gains were not accidental. They were the result of deliberate political choices, coordinated finance, technological innovation, and not least sustained activism that pushed leaders to act. However, the environment that made that progress possible has changed. We now see what some call a polycrisis, where food insecurity, debt, inflation, climate shocks, and geopolitical rivalry reinforce one another. Many African economies are paying more to service debt than to invest in health or education. Promises of climate finance and emergency liquidity remain only partially fulfilled. In the meantime, in richer countries, domestic pressures are making international commitments politically harder to defend. It is in this context that activism becomes both more complicated and indeed more necessary. Activism today is no longer just about rallying around a single campaign. It is about shaping the narratives that actually make policy possible. It means pushing back against a politics of scarcity and making a convincing case for why supporting vulnerable countries is both ethically necessary and strategically sensible in an interdependent world. It also means scrutinizing the rules of the global system, who they serve, who they exclude, and why long-standing asymmetries in finance and representation remain so resistant to reform. At the same time, activists must also adapt to a world in which agency is shifting. Many governments and civil society actors across the world are no longer asking for aid in the traditional sense. They're demanding fairer rules, meaningful representation, and access to affordable capital. They want a seat at the table in influential global forums and a say in shaping the policies that affect their futures. That shift from charity to structural reform changes the terrain of campaigning. It calls for new coalitions, new narratives, and a closer alignment between local priorities and global advocacy. So what does it mean to be an activist in this moment? How do you build political permission for reform when trust is low? How do you mobilize the political center, not just the already convinced? And how do you connect local concerns, a park, a school, a cost of living crisis, to global debates about climate finance, sovereign debt, and economic transformation. My guest is David McNair, Executive Director at One.org. One fights for a more just world by demanding the investments needed to create economic opportunities and healthier lives on the African continent. For two decades, David has worked on campaigns that helped reduce child mortality, unlock billions in funding for climate and sustainable development, reform parts of the global financial architecture, and crack down on grand corruption and tax evasion. In our conversation, David and I explore not only what has worked in the past, but why some of those strategies may no longer be sufficient. We discuss the changing politics of solidarity, the rise of the global south in forums such as the G20, the reform of development finance, and the need to move upstream to shape culture and politics, not just policy. Before we begin, a quick note of thanks. Of late, I've received incredibly encouraging feedback from listeners, and I'm grateful to those of you who have taken the time to share your perspectives and reactions on social media. Please keep doing so as it really helps the show reach an even larger global audience. You are listening to In Pursuit of Development and I am Dan Bannick. David, it's been a while since we've been trying to get you on the show. I'm happy to see you today. Welcome. Thank you. It's a real privilege to be here. And yeah, thank you for having me. How do you see the role of activism in promoting global development? development amidst a lot of this doom and gloom that we keep hearing about? What does it mean to be an activist promoting poverty reduction, you know, working towards better health security? Give us your take on this. It's a really tough time. And if you think about the first quarter of the century, we've been living through an age of miracles. I mean, everyone knows the stats, you know, in 2000, one in four people live in extreme poverty, you know, that's one in 10. The AIDS-related deaths declined by 70%, 65 million lives saved through the Global Fund. And in a sense, so much of that was enabled by a permissible policy environment in which leaders supported multilateralism. China joined the World Trade Organization. And that, I think, has fundamentally changed. A lot of the debate, I think, in our sector sees that as a sign of failure, that we haven't kind of caught up with the trends and so on. There is another way of looking at it, which is that it is a sign of success in that prosperity has spread around the world. And that is now creating kind of tensions because the middle class in advanced economies have lost out. But poor people living in other parts of the world have gained massively. And it's not gone far enough, of course. But, you know, we have lived through this era where the kind of permissible environment for cooperation, for aid, for development has led to major outcomes. So I think we shouldn't forget that when we kind of hear the kind of doom and gloom messages. Yes, that tide is turning. And yes, the political picture is quite bleak, particularly in Europe and North America. But go to the other parts of the world and that's not the case. I mean, I just came back from Johannesburg where I was there for the G20 summit. And it was fascinating reading the news reports, you know, international news. It was all about the US not turning up and like all these tensions and so on. In the conversation in Johannesburg, Donald Trump was barely mentioned. It was about, you know, we've got these challenges. Here's how we kind of rack and stack the contributing factors to the challenges. And here's how we solve them. And there are things we can do on our own. There are things that we can do with partners. And that might be with the traditional development actors. It might be with the Middle East. It might be with Asia, but we need to take things into our own hands. And I think that's potentially a kind of a sign of hope in that there is a kind of emerging generation and, you know, the demographics are really clear in the African continent, particularly that are saying, you know, we can't rely on other people to solve our problems. Let's identify them, figure out the solutions and innovate in ways that will solve that. Now, that doesn't negate the fact that there are major challenges when it comes to tariffs, when it comes to conflict, when it comes to a lack of resources, particularly for low-income countries that just don't have access to other forms of finance. And we need to work on that. But to come back to your question about activism, I really believe that policy is downstream from politics. Politics is downstream from culture. And culture is not a kind of defined thing that is not shapeable. It is something that we can invest in, that we can support thought leaders who will kind of change and shape the environment. And I'm somewhat obsessed by the Mont Pelerin Society. I don't know if you've ever come across this, but it was created by Hayek in 1947. And they met in Mont Pelerin, which is a little village off the shores of Lake Geneva. And their ideology at the time was that they were worried about the overreach of the state post-World War II. And so they put together a group, a relatively small group of thought leaders who had a 20-year plan to embed the ideas of neoliberalism, which at the time were extremely radical. And they had a concerted plan to bring those radical ideas into the centre. And in the 70s, whenever the oil price crisis happened, the pump was primed because of the work that they had done over 20 years for Thatcher and Reagan to come in and build a whole policy agenda around a worldview that they had shaped. And I think we need to be thinking about that once again, because the fact that we've seen so much progress means that, you know, people like me, people in the kind of activist field have almost taken our eye off the ball in terms of those upstream issues that are fundamental to giving us the political license to do the technical, sectoral, siloed work that we've all been focused on. And we need to go back upstream and shape the culture and the politics in a way which will lead to the long-term outcomes and the sustaining of those outcomes that we need to see. I like the fact that you highlight the successes. And that's been a very important part of my work in the last decade or so to talk about what works, not just the doom and gloom. And I've always tried to balance the picture. You know, when you talk about what works often and the successes, and I know you've worked extensively on reducing child mortality and highlighting, you know, grand corruption and how to combat that and tax evasion. The thing is that when one talks about what works on the successes, a lot of people point out, but if you talk too much about what works, then you gloss over all the challenges. And my argument has always been, no, no, no, we need to balance the picture. We can just have a one focus on doom and gloom We should also highlight some of the successes Otherwise it just doesn give hope But from an activist perspective David I mean you always need something to campaign against right You want something to fight for. And I suppose there may sometimes be a tendency to not talk so much about the successes because you want to focus on those huge challenges, you know, and we still have poverty around the world, extreme poverty. We still have an energy security problem on the African continent. We still have a lack of economic growth. Afrobarometer studies on the continent keep highlighting that it's jobs, jobs and jobs. We have a debt crisis. So we have all of these things. Sometimes when you have success, maybe one thinks differently as an activist. One thinks about where's the next problem going to be? Or maybe that you feel that you won't get funding because people say, hey, come on, you know, there's so much more going on. You mentioned, you know, this the middle class in our parts of the world that is more frustrated now. Yeah. You know, because they feel that, oh, there's been too much outsourcing. You know, we are having unemployment. So why are we going to show solidarity? And why should we give money to charities and NGOs when we have a health queue and the NHS needs funding? So do you feel that solidarity, the idea of solidarity is changing, that people have less to offer others? Have we become more selfish? That is certainly what a lot of people say we have since 2016 in the UK and also in the US. I mean, in a sense, the permissible policy environment that we saw in the first part of the century, the kind of like Blair-Obama era, in part what we did was to say, let's find centrist leaders that want to do the right thing and give them the ideas and the political cover to be able to do that. And there was a vocal minority that championed that. And then a majority that was, in a sense, gave permission, but was never going to champion these issues. And in a sense, that vocal minority, which used to fight for debt relief and AIDS and so on, has been replaced in some respects by a vocal minority that is fighting for ethno-nationalism, protect what's at home. And that's a very compelling message. and I think part of the challenge is that we've seen a collapse of trust in institutions and if you look at the polling and you know Rockefeller did a poll in September and then recently updated it and it showed you know massive support for multilateral cooperation you know fighting climate change but when you ask those same people about their belief in the institutions to be able to deliver impact they just don't believe that that you know the UN the IMF the World Bank the development NGOs are going to. That's because they've been fed ideas of corruption, mismanagement, wastage. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we need to kind of, you know, there's a narrative about mismanagement that we need to proactively challenge. And I've seen, you know, in my work, you know, our sector, they almost don't want to talk about those issues because they feel that if we do talk about it, it opens up a Pandora. Exactly. My argument has been that conversation is happening anyway. And if you don't engage, you leave the whole story to people who want it. But it's also the credibility of the activists at stake. If you don't talk about the failures, you know, it can't just be one-sided success that you guys are engaging in. These are difficult issues. You have to fail, you know, in order to succeed. Yeah. And I think we need to tell that more nuanced story. But the other thing is, is the kind of conflation of crises. You know, Adam Tooze talked about the poly crisis a couple of years ago. I think, you know, and the, you know, Greta Thunberg, you know, doom and gloom message, which I think is very compelling for a particular subset of activists in our population. But actually, if we want political consensus around these issues, we need to mobilize the center. And there was a really interesting group called Countess Inn that did some extensive polling in Europe and North America a few years ago. And what they find was that group is completely turned off by doom and gloom messages because they don't see that they have any agency in it. They might just think, well, I don't believe that. Or they might believe it and then don't think that they have any role to play. But it leads to this lack of hope that, you know, there's nothing that I can do to change the world. So why even try? But what they find with this group of the centre politically and the centre economically, which are critical for mobilising people to support these issues, is that they wanted to protect things in their local community that they loved. So if you ask people to take action to support their local park, their local forest, mobilise as part of a local community to do something locally that then ladders up to the international, they're very, very keen to do so. it's when you kind of don't take that local step and you just kind of jump to well you know we're going to miss 1.5 degrees and therefore this world is terrible well I mean what what do I as a you know community worker in a local school like what do I do about that there's no agency involved and I think what we need to do is help people understand like what's actually going on who makes these decisions and where do I have agency within it because that's the hopeful and empowering thing. And then how do you build communities where you can find other people like you that work on that stuff together? And if we don't do that kind of grassroots mobilization where the local is connected to the global, then you just lose people, I think. I want to pick up on something you said earlier about the media landscape, at least in our parts of the world, that often portrays certain world events or these high-level meetings. It is usually focusing on one aspect, whether the U.S. is part and parcel of it or who's pulling out, who's backing it, who wasn't there, etc. One of the most important themes this season for my show has been to talk about the rise of the global south. And I've been making the argument that the G20 has become quite important, especially the last four years, given that the presidencies of the G20 have been held by global south countries, you know, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Brazil. And some of the ideas of development that are being promoted in these discussions and the declarations is actually interesting. We need more attention in our parts of the world in relation to what the global south really wants. And I've been making the argument that we seem to differ on the idea of development. You know, in the global north, we talk more about climate emission reductions, pollution control, whatever that affects our lives. It's not about extreme poverty. It is not about, you know, health inequity. But in other parts of the world, people are speaking a different language. And some of this is coming across in the BRICS. By the way, I thought BRICS was a dead and buried organization or an entity. We see the resurrection of the BRICS, the G20. Give us a little sense of what the discussions were like in Johannesburg, in Pretoria, this whole year that South Africa has been sharing the G20, what would you highlight as the successful sort of stories or the messaging coming out, rather than just focusing on the fact that the US did not attend? I mean, your first point about the reporting of these events speaks to a broader issue, which maybe we can come on to later, which is the kind of shifts in the media and communication landscape and the lack of investment of news outlets in really following the detail of these things. and therefore you just get this top line analysis. But I think to your broader point, this succession of Global South G20s has been incredibly impactful. Like if you look at the work that I do on development finance, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, they did a lot of work on making the multilateral development bank system more effective and pushing the MDBs to better leverage their balance sheets. And that work, which was done under these Global South presidencies has unlocked about 400 billion in additional lending headroom, low-cost lending to support infrastructure, to support development. So these are really practical things that, you know, their stories, because they're kind of technical, they don't get told, but there is a lot of work that's being done behind the scenes. So kind of come to your question about the South African G20. I think that the narrative there was we want a seat at the table and we want to be taken seriously and we want to address fundamental imbalances or injustices in the global economy. And one of the kind of principal issues that the South African presidency took up was the cost of borrowing, cost of sovereign lending, cost of capital, where they see the risk readings that are published by credit rating agencies apportioning higher levels of risk to African economies than is necessarily appropriate because of the default rates that the data shows. And therefore, they're paying more for their debt. there's less fiscal space to invest in investment but also the likelihood of default is higher because you're paying higher rates so the whole idea was like let's tackle this issue in very practical ways looking at what data needs to be published what are the domestic government's reforms that are needed and where do we look at need to look at the international agenda around how international regulations are driving these high costs of capital but the whole principle was not that we want more finance or we want charity or we want reparations for past injustices. It's like we want a fair playing field so that we can participate. And that's the story that's being told. And it's really interesting how different G20 members have responded to that kind of story. Yeah. What was the reaction from the global north to some of these issues, particularly debt? And I know that you're interested in this. And this is a very polarized topic, thinking about media coverage. You know, I feel sometimes there's a one-sided China bashing on the issue of debt. This debt trap rubbish narrative that really there is no evidence that China is actively promoting this. And the fact that China, I think, does not even hold much of the debt. I mean, there are Western actors who hold more debt. It's the multilateral development banks, the euro bonds. And there are many challenges related to Chinese loans, etc. But certainly not to single out China as being the big, you know, bad actor here. When I mean, you were attending these discussions in South Africa, what was the reaction from the global north to these issues? I mean, did they feel that they were part of the problem in relation to debt relief, the slow nature of debt restructuring that happens and this cycle that keeps continuing, it just gets worse and worse every day. Yes. So there are two kind of prevailing narratives, which I think, you know, you've alluded to that are not true. The first is that China owns most of Africa's debt. And I think the latest data shows that China, Chinese agencies, both private and public Chinese agencies own 12% of Africa's debt. So the majority is held by their multi-advent development banks or private creditors, most of which are Western. And the other is that the debt crisis is because African governments have borrowed and been irresponsible and so on. And there are elements of truth in both those stories, but they're not the whole truth. The reality is that what we're seeing for countries that have gone into debt distress in the era of kind of effectively free money post-financial crisis, countries went to euro bond markets to borrow because it made sense. They have massive demographic needs, massive infrastructure needs, and Eurobound markets can move much faster than multilateral development banks can. But following COVID, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, what happened was the inflation issues in the US led to the Federal Reserve increasing interest rates And because most sovereign debt is denominated in US dollars that led to a kind of perfect storm of the US dollar getting stronger So countries are earning in domestic currency paying their debt in the US dollar, which is getting stronger, and the actual interest rates themselves are going up. So those were exogenous shocks, which African economies have nothing to do with. And that story needs to be told. The other story is the idea that Africa has too much debt. If you look at a proportion of GDP, It's far lower than any of the G7 economies. But the debt is too expensive. And that's where this kind of cost of capital agenda comes in. Now, there is a whole G20 initiative which emerged from COVID called the Common Framework, designed to help countries that get into debt distress to find resolutions. And that has not been working, in part because it was a flawed design from the start. If a country got into difficulty, the burden of pulling together all of the creditors lies with the country at the time when they are by definition at their weakest negotiating power and what we're seeing is that because the creditor landscape is so complex you've got private creditors like BlackRock and PIMCO you've got China you've got the Paris Club it's almost like everyone is kind of pointing at the other saying Nibu first and the Paris Club doesn't want to offer countries relief because they think that those countries will use it to pay off China China doesn't want to offer relief because they think they'll use it to pay off the private creditors. And you've just got this kind of circle of no one moving. And meanwhile, it's the countries that are in debt distress that are waiting years for some kind of resolution to that. And it's not just the countries that have applied to the common framework. A lot of countries are facing debt challenges, but they've seen what has happened to those countries that have basically faced no resolution through the common framework. So they decide to keep servicing their debt. And in doing so, they have to cut back on social spending. But then, David, this is a never-ending story. What is the solution going forward? Should we get actors like the African Union, by the way, you know, talking about agency, the African Union now is part of the G20. Did you see them coming up with certain solutions? I mean, there's a lot of talk about African problems require African solutions. Do we have other actors in this space that can mediate? this will continue otherwise. It'll always be the suspicion and pointing fingers at the other. Yeah, so I mean, there have been a couple of moves. So the African Union pulled together a common African position on debt for the first time this year. And the G20, I think in October, published a position on debt, which was basically more of the same. There was nothing new within it because of this dynamic. And my sense is that in this fragmented world, there's no one place we can go to get an answer and therefore we're going to see solutions kind of emerging in lots of different places and that might be bilateral negotiations but you know with it with a country in china or a middle eastern coming country coming in to offer back to buy expense expensive debt and refinance it at a lower rate and the key thing that we need to invest in is collective bargaining power so that countries can come together they've got the data the knowledge the negotiating skills and they can come together and say actually we want a resolution to this and I've seen that myself working really effectively so a couple of years ago just ahead of the FUCAC summit the forum on China and Africa we were working on this aspect of IMF policy called special drawing rights and at the time we were trying to get this this is a kind of a reserve asset you know the IMF can print SDRs in the way that the Federal Reserve can print print currency during a crisis and we were trying to get advanced economies to share their special drawing rights with African economies to help them weather the COVID crisis. And at the time, Macky Sal was chair of the AU. And we got a memo to Macky Sal on a Thursday afternoon saying, you should ask Xi Jinping to recycle 10 billion SDRs. This is Thursday afternoon. The next Tuesday, so like four days later, Xi Jinping was announcing in his speech at FUCAC that China would recycle 10 billion SDRs. That is impact. You know, when you have this kind of collective voice, these superpowers are in listening mode, at least some of them are. And I think that's a really powerful thing. So one of the areas that gives me hope on the agenda is that there is now a, what's called a borrowers club, where sovereign borrowers are coming together to share information, to figure out how they negotiate with these kind of big players, whether they be private creditors, whether they be sovereigns, whether they'd be MDBs. And I think it's early days because this has just kicked off, but I think that could be a really powerful tool to say, rather than kind of assume that all the answers are going to come from the UN or the G20. The answers might come from anywhere, but if you can have your data and negotiating power and collective bargaining power in place, then wherever the answer emerges, you can negotiate a better deal. A lot of interesting stuff is coming out of our conversation already. We're talking about negotiating capacity, agency, but also owning some of these debates and these solutions. And I'm thinking about Zambia that went through this debt crisis and debt restructuring problem. A couple of years ago, I had Inder Mitt Gill, the chief economist of the World Bank, and he was actually saying that even his organization can do a better job. One of the big challenges is the sheer amount of time it takes to resolve this, that every actor in this debt repackaging, restructuring process can be quicker. You know, so time itself, it can just draw on and on and everybody's just waiting for the other to act. So that was one thing. The thing about collective negotiating power capacity, David, this has been a huge challenge for many African countries. One often relies on the bigger actors maybe to show some sort of support and solidarity with smaller neighbors and smaller economies, you know, if it's Ethiopia and Kenya and South Africa, speaking on behalf of some of their fellow countries, neighbors, that would help. But the extent to which that is happening or can happen is also up for grabs because these countries themselves have problems, right? So, and then this thing about agency, you know, I'm sorry, but I feel like sometimes the African Union has been a disappointment that there's not really much happening there. And I think if the African Union can get its act together, maybe, you know, things can be pushed in the right direction. I don't want to be, you know, focused on doom and gloom. I'm glad that you're highlighting also what works. I want to move on to what recently happened at the COP in Brazil, the climate change negotiations, just like the G20. That was also an event that I suppose the reporting was mostly negative and perhaps rightly so in many ways, because there's been increasingly at these high level climate change negotiation meetings, the fossil fuel lobby has been very active. You know, the petro states and their diplomacy, their solutions are being pushed forward. What was your take? I don't know if you were there in Brazil, in Belém, but there was quite a lot of talk about Muti Rao and consensus and local solutions. what has been the role of activists in these negotiations? I hear often that activists feel pushed out. It's these official partners who get access to some of the most important forums. What is the current feeling among activists? Are you able to influence a lot of these negotiations, these discussions, or are you being excluded? Well, first thing to say is I wasn't at COP and haven't been kind of following that process in a lot of detail. My kind of general view is if there are powerful players coming to try and infiltrate and shape a process, it shows and demonstrates that that process is, you know. Worth fighting for. Worth fighting for, right. Yeah. And I think, you know, like if you look at the science, if you look at the emission levels, if you look at the financing available, it's clear that, you know, things are not where they need to be. But we also need to think about the counterfactual, Like, where would they be if the COP process and the Paris Agreement wasn't in place? And in some respects, I think the COP process is doing exactly what it should and can do, which is to establish a North Star and on an annual basis, review progress towards that and prompt debate about whether we're moving fast enough and stimulate investment in the kinds of innovations and tools that will get us there. And if you look at the cost of solar, the cost of renewable energy, there have been massive, massive progress on that agenda. It needs to move faster, and that's why we need to keep pushing the debate. But if the COP process didn't exist, we wouldn't be having this debate because there would be no measurable target, which we were kind of tracking against on a regular basis. But David, some people are saying we shouldn't be meeting this often. The COP's happening every year. We should have a two-year pause on these high-level meetings. meetings they're useless what is your response to that allegation i mean i do get kind of frustrated by the fact that there is a kind of like a trade show element that is emerging to these cops like everyone turns up and kind of is you know hosting their own event and you know same with unga you know everyone spends their time like running between events they're over side events are important yeah um and i think like having a much more kind of focused agenda to say what can these multilateral processes only do and how can we focus on keep keeping the focus on on the real issues when it comes to reviewing progress against our goals this summer i published a paper called frugal multilateralism it kicked off because i was frustrated with this ua ed process which seems to me like at a time when we need like dag hammers cold kind of you know visionary rethinking about the future of multilateralism instead we're getting like a mckinsey deck and which is you know how do you like cut stuff without looking too bad about it part of that reimagination is that i think we need to say there's been way too much mission creep there's competition between agencies agencies are doing things that local actors could do and can we just get back to the core element of asking this question again and again what can multilateralism uniquely do and how can we keep the focus on those things that it can uniquely do and like do that stuff well rather than trying to kind of spread ourselves thin and kind of cover the whole gamut of issues and kind of implement on on these things as well and i think that's where i see the distinction between the paris agreement and the sdgs because the paris agreement you know agreed around the same time to me the paris agreement is a major success because it is focused and there is a process which is consistently reviewing the segs had 17 goals hundreds of indicators like that's not a strategic plan at all it's just a kind of a tool to say let's measure everything and i don't think that has succeeded at all and and there's not got caught up in culture wars like the climate debate has but i think i think this idea of like having clear goals and devolving responsibility for achieving those goals to the most local level possible is where we need to go with our whole development and multilateral system. It was interesting to hear about frugal multilateralism. Some of that criticism, David, I hear is also leveled at NGOs, that they are like the UN. There are too many of them, you know, certain countries that I study, like Malawi, there are hundreds and hundreds of NGOs, everybody working in isolation, islands of excellence being created. These NGOs don talk to each other So some of these criticisms could also be leveled against you guys Are you all speaking with one voice Are there different camps pushing for different things I know you're part of the One campaign. It does help to have Bono and celebrities having established this, lending their celebrity power. But does this also mean that you guys don't always agree among yourselves? Or how do you see that terrain at the moment? I mean, I agree 100% that, you know, there's a huge amount of fragmentation and competition and duplication. And in a sense, I think that's what, you know, this moment brings, which is different in that the resource constraints are going to force, you know, a consolidation and a level of focus, which I think will be like as painful as it has been and will be. and as many people who will immediately be impacted i think the medium term trajectory is looking at a sector which is too fragmented and is too bloated becoming much more focused and if you look at other industry sectors you know media fast moving consumer goods like i know i know the ngo sector is a very different case but they have all faced massive consolidation and economies of scale built through that and i think there's maybe a case to say actually that's what needs to happen in the kind of NGO sector. Not that there would be like, you know, multinational NGOs, which kind of buy up lots of others, but there are, I think, ecosystem services, which could support, you know, lots of different actors and kind of play across the field rather than fragmentation. And this is one of the things that I'm working on at the moment, because, you know, working on policy analysis and data, I see different NGOs who have their own policy shop, You know, often using kind of quite outdated data methodologies, duplicating, competing, publishing the same report year on year. And I think there's an opportunity now with technology to say, actually, why don't we just kind of create common data systems across the board, which serve academic institutions, which serve policymakers, which serve NGOs, and as a result, become a single source of truth where you can access data analysis and answer questions quickly. That's just one example. I think there are lots of other examples where rather than, you know, what you've described in Malawi, that we kind of consolidate these services and kind of bring together the best actors who can do the best job rather than, you know, so much fragmentation. David, I sometimes feel that this is a business, you know. We all need a job. And NGOs, you know, you can't have idealists. People need a job. They need to expand their services. They need to document that they're doing a good job. That's why you have to have the reports. You have to be accountable to the taxpayer, whoever's funding you. And to top it all, there's a funding crisis. Aid agencies are cutting down, being dismantled. People are really being pushed, organizations, into a tight corner. And there are two ways to look at it. One is that, oh, God, this is doom and gloom, depressing, not enough money. But I've also been arguing that this can open up new avenues of possibility, new ways of doing business, you know, being perhaps more effective, maybe focusing on a few things rather than the 17 SDGs, you know, a different mindset. Maybe that kind of crisis that we're experiencing now will open up new ways of doing business, even for the NGOs. Yeah. And I think what we're going through now is what the music industry went through 20 years ago. if you remember Napster and all that stuff, you know. And from that emerged, you know, different ways of managing live shows, Spotify, you know. It's not perfect, but there is a whole new ecosystem that has emerged that we couldn't have imagined 20 years ago. And I think that's going to happen and that can be a really good thing, you know. Yeah, thanks for mentioning Napster. My God, yeah, it brings back fond memories. Now it's just Spotify. But David, if you were to highlight what you think the NGO activist sector should be doing more of, what would it be? And I would like you to please, for my listeners, highlight what you think has been the successful strategy. I know you've been working in terms of reducing child mortality or fighting corruption or fighting tax evasion. Are there a sort of a list of common strategies that were adopted in some of these campaigns that we should be focusing more on? So, you know, how would you like this sector to move forward, given also the fact that there's not enough funding available and the middle class in Europe and in America pushing back again, showing this kind of solidarity? I mean, the things that have worked in the past will not work in the future. And that's clear. I mean, if you look at, you know, a few examples, the Jubilee debt campaign, which was, you know, is seen as like a massive success in our world, was built on the infrastructure of the churches. It was church-based activist groups that kind of made that work. church-based groups are no longer what they were and that infrastructure isn't there. Second on the communication landscape, in that time you know you could get a piece in two newspapers, one television show and you'd reach everyone and that's clearly not the case now. So we need to think about in a fragmented landscape who are we trying to influence, who do they trust and how do we deploy our activities to like shape those conversations that people are part of rather than a kind of macro level conversation and even if you had unlimited resources to like reach the masses your issues would get caught up in culture wars and you wouldn't succeed anyway so it needs a very different kind of tactic the other thing that we did in the past particularly on kind of the tax agenda and on illicit financial flows and particularly on oil and gas transparency was to say let's influence brussels and the brussels effect of being a kind of extra territorial super regulatory power will kind of shape the global market. And that's no longer true either. So these tactics that have worked in the past are not going to work. We need goals that kind of play in lots of different spaces. And I think part of the challenge that our sector has is that we're way too much focused on the inputs. So we talk about 0.7, we talk about raising trillions for development, We talk about, you know, and I'm guilty of this. I think we need to move much more towards targeted outcome goals that are specific and clear and can be owned by countries. So the way that I see the kind of development finance landscape shifting is kind of into three categories. One where you have concessional finance going to countries that have no other access to finance. and increasingly I think that will move towards countries that are aligned with the national security interests of donors. Then there's a group of countries, mostly middle-income countries, where doing things like addressing cost of capital and unlocking more private finance will be the kind of route to supporting economic transformation and I'm a big fan of Stefan Durkhoen's analysis that you need an elite which has the incentive to drive transformation and if you don't have that external actors aren't going to make much political settlements gambling on development right and then the third piece is investing in global public goods and i think a big part of that will be looking at ways in which we can make the case that investing in disease surveillance or you know climate resilience is actually a national security strategy and where you can kind of build a different kind of argument for that but what's clear to me is that the kind of The charitable argument that, you know, we should help these poor people overseas because they're less fortunate than us is no longer resonating. The recipients of that effort don't want it. And the people in rich countries no longer feel rich and no longer feel an obligation to the poor. So that to me, that kind of like that is a legacy business model which needs to decline and will decline. And instead, we need to find new arguments and really segment how we're thinking about engaging with this route to economic transformation. I'm reminded of Band-Aid and do they know it's Christmas time at all? You know, some of those, the lyrics is cringeworthy. If you think about it now, I mean, something about nothing ever grows and, you know, everything is bad and no rivers flow. And do they know it's Christmas? We can't have saviors. You know, this is more a question about agency. Many, many parts of the world, countries don't want to be saved. They want to save themselves. It is about their wishes. And I think one of the big challenges, David, for me is in much of our parts of the world, we are always trying to define development or what people want and need. We're still not listening to African voices. We need to amplify the voices of people living in poverty. They may not be always thinking about the after tomorrow or next month. They're thinking about today. where sometimes in our parts of the world, we're always thinking about tomorrow, day after tomorrow, next year, next 50 years, next 100 years. That long-term perspective is important, but for a lot of people, it is about surviving today. Which brings me to the final set of issues. The question I wanted to ask you is going forward in 2026, I can imagine debt being still a very important issue, agency being an important issue, collective bargaining being an important issue, climate being an important issue. Are there any other urgent sort of burning issues that you think we should tackle that the world should be focusing on, both in terms of academia, activists, politicians, practitioners? Are there certain things that we are not prioritizing that deserve more attention? Well, I think on all of those issues, you could take a lens of, arguably a kind of legacy lens that says there are rich countries and poor countries and we need to do things in rich countries which benefit poor countries. I think we're moving to an era where like inequality within countries is a fundamental issue and I'm somewhat obsessed by this report that the EU published a couple years ago. It was led by Enrico Letta, the Letta report, that showed that there are 60 million Europeans who live in regions where GDP per capita is lower today than it was in the year 2000. So this idea that you've got like, you know, 60 million people in Europe that are left behind by globalization, by the EU, by all of the things, by this miracle that we started out talking about, like we need to find projects and policies and initiatives that serve people who are left behind in advanced countries as well as in developing countries and that are mutually reinforcing and i think finding what those are and building those kind of like flagship tools that governments can invest in will be fundamentally important you know that might be europe investing in its green tech and building battery factories in left behind parts of the north of England and partnering with Zambia to secure the copper or DRC to secure the cobalt. Like, I don't know what it is, but we need to like create that connectivity and show that we are mutually dependent on one another for our success rather than see this as a kind of charitable endeavor. David, I really enjoyed our chat. Thank you so much for coming on my show today. Thank you so much for your time, Dan. Thank you for listening to In Pursuit of Development with Professor Dan Bannock from the University of Oslo. Please email your questions, comments and suggestions to inpursuitofdevelopment at gmail.com.