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This Week in Global Development
US aid leadership changes and a controversial UN merger
00:34:26
This week we discuss https://www.devex.com/news/state-department-s-foreign-aid-chief-heads-to-the-white-house-112830 from the https://www.devex.com/organizations/united-states-department-of-state-dos-23842’s foreign aid bureau to the White House. His...
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- [00:04]
A
My name is Advaah Saldinger and you're listening to this Week in Global Development hosted by myself, Rumby Chikamba and David Ainsworth. I am joined to talk about the latest in this week's global development news by my colleagues Colm lynch and Jesse Chase Lubitz. Colm and Jesse, thanks so much for joining me today. We have plenty to talk about from potential UN agency mergers to climate policy to the Hamburg Sustainability Conference. But first we are going to start with some news that is breaking this week and a story that's sort of evolving by by the day, which is around leadership of foreign assistance at the US State Department. So what we heard earlier this week, Colm, is that Jeremy Lewin, who has been leading for foreign assistance at the State Department is out. And so tell us a little bit about what we know about that and sort of where things stand with that latest news.
- [01:03]
B
Thanks for having me, Eva. So we were hearing earlier this week that Jeremy Lewin, as you mentioned, the acting undersecretary for Foreign Assistance, Religious freedom and Humanitarian affairs, was moving on to the White House for a job overseeing this is like the senior director for the Western Hemispheric affairs. So Jeremy has been the key person dealing with issues of foreign assistance. He was the one who restored funding to the UN after the initial cuts of US funding to the un, set up a channel where he's already put in more than $3.5 billion through the UN's office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Just in the last few weeks we've been reporting on some new so called macro awards, one of them over about $2 billion and one of them just under that for the World Food Crab, the World Food Program, another one for unicef. There were others that were apparently sort of in the pipeline that were going to be announced. So now we are sort of wondering, everybody's wondering is this going to change the funding landscape? Might Lewin have been, even though he had played a role with DOGE and dismantling USAID and basically dismantling the US foreign aid system, was he more inclined to support funding for humanitarian operations than his replacement, a guy named Andrew Vprick? He was the up until now he's been the Assistant Secretary of State for population, refugees and migration, a hardline sort of ally of Stephen Miller, very much kind of trying to dismantle the U.S. an international refugee system, asylum programs and that sort of thing. He's been more sort of negative about the prospect of foreign assistance. So either we will continue to see a continuation of the model that's been backed by Lewin or some people in the State Department are concerned that this could signal to a certain degree that there is going to be more of another kind of retrenchment on that front. So that's kind of where we are at the moment, where we don't know whether Viprik's move to the foreign assistance job is going to be permanent. He's in an acting position. We also heard some possible successors to Lewin. One name that we heard was Nick Checkers, who deals with African affairs and also has involved in foreign assistance issues involving Africa. So a lot of uncertainty. None of this stuff is kind of publicly announced. So we just sort of find out our sources, but that's kind of what we're hearing today.
- [03:41]
A
Yeah, and like I said, it's. It's something that's changing. You know, you could get feedback in there in an acting capacity and eventually have someone else in that job. It's. It's also, I think. I think he's probably retaining his other position. My understanding is that there was sort of efforts to separate out humanitarian assistance from the sort of refugee migration portfolio, and so now he's going to oversee that again. So I think, yeah. Have also sort of heard some potential concerns about what this would mean for humanitarian assistance and other funding moving forward. So obviously something that we will continue to be following here at Demex as this unfolds and sort of looking at the implications. I think for a lot of people, they were just sort of wrapping their heads around what Lewin's priorities were. And so with him out, I think there's questions then about what. What are the administration priorities, Who's. Who's sort of setting them. But one thing we do know has been a US Priority in its relationship with the multilateral development banks is sort of getting them to focus more on the basics and on development and not on climate. And on that front, we had some news this week, and in that case, the US has sort of succeeded in pushing the World bank to remove its climate finance target. Jesse, you have been tracking the ins and outs of these sort of debates around that climate finance target and the World Bank's Climate Change Action Plan, which was, you know, due to expire yesterday, but was extended sort of at the 11th hour. So can you update us a little bit about sort of that saga and where things stand, what sort of shook out and the US Role in that as well?
- [05:25]
C
Yeah, absolutely. So basically, this is. This is a plan called the Climate Change Action Plan that the World bank put into Force in 2021. And it was meant to be a five year plan ending in 2025, last year. And it basically outlines, you know, the finance target, which was originally 35% of World bank financing going to climate change related, you know, projects alignment with the Paris agreement and sort of an effort to rely less on fossil fuels, phase out fossil fuels. And over the course of those five, five years they, they exceeded the 35 target. They actually made it to 45, 48% even last year. And in the end of 2025, they decided to extend it for one more year, leaving everything intact. But then as we were coming up to the end of June, which was the expiration date, there was a lot of tension over what would happen next. And I was hearing from a lot of different sources that the US was really pressuring the management of the bank because that's who decides this, not the board, but the board. The board members from the US were really pressuring the management to either completely get rid of this plan or water it down in some way. And there was a lot of back and forth. You had sort of the usual suspects from the European Union really pushing for these strong climate goals and you know, the, the US sort of pushing back over the course of, of several months and we were kind of coming up to this final date really not knowing what was going to happen. I think the really interesting thing here is that, you know, if we didn't already know how the US feels about climate change, there would have been a really legitimate argument to get rid of this, this finance goal. The bank has already beat it. A lot of people who are in the climate space told me it's not a crazy idea to think about a different way to measure climate success at the bank. Now that we've achieved this goal, I guess you could make it 50, 60% of the target, but perhaps there's a more creative way. Let's think about the outcomes, let's think about how climate is actually integrated into the bank. But knowing what we know, now is really not the best time to do anything that could be perceived as weakening climate targets. So the hope was let's just leave it as it is for now. Ultimately they came to, I guess, somewhat of a compromise, which is that the action plan will remain apparently indefinitely. It didn't say that super clearly in the announcement, but I've been told that it's an indefinite continuation of this plan, which is great, but without any finance goal. So there's no reference to, to the 45%, to the 35% nothing other than that everything else has stayed the same. And so, you know, it kind of depends on your perspective to some degree. I think it was definitely avoiding the worst case scenario. But it does show that there, the pressure that we heard about from the US was ultimately relatively successful.
- [08:13]
A
Yeah, and I think the, the way the bank sort of explained this move is that it's aligned with their shift away from inputs to, to outcomes. So there are in the World bank scorecard climate related targets. That's the way they're going to measure climate moving forward. And I think, you know, in reality there are folks who have, you know, like there, there are two camps on this. There are people who think that, you know, if the bank has, you know, really significant focus on climate, it could take away from the development focus. And so this is sort of been a microcosm of a larger debate that has played out at some of these institutions as well. But definitely a place where we've seen the US sort of use, use their voice and their weight for, you know, I'm just going to take a minute and do a shameless plug. Jesse has written a lot about this in the Devex Invested newsletter that comes out Tuesdays and Thursdays. We both write for that newsletter and it covers lots of development finance related news. So if you're interested there's, there'll be a link in the description. I encourage you to go sign up to hear more about this. Or another big story that we wrote about and invested this week is a big board decision to actually, for what appears to be the first time, essentially overturn or decide to go against the findings of the independent accountability mechanism for its private sector arm, the ifc, which found that the IFC had violated its policies in a series investments to microfinance institutions in Cambodia. The head of the cao, which is the accountability mechanism for ifc, announced that she's resigning right after this. So I think, you know, it's been, I think quite controversial. We're hearing a lot from, you know, organizations that are tracking accountability around concerns because this happens at the same time as the bank has actually announced that it's merging all of its accountability mechanisms. So a lot to watch there. Subscribe to Invested to learn more about it.
- [10:11]
C
So some of our previous panels have touched. Climate finance is not just a matter of more money, but it's also about creating the policy and regulatory environments and conditions that make investment possible. So in our next conversation I would like to welcome Lakhas Batley, who's senior Director for Conservation and Climate Finance Policy at The Nature Conservancy. So we did, in our earlier discussion, it was underscored how important having the right regulatory framework is to actually being able to deploy capital to encourage investments. And we also talked in a lot of our conversations today about how tend to view climate as a cost, not necessarily an investment opportunity. How do you think that government leaders, private sector leaders, should think differently about these investments as drivers of economic growth, resilience and competitiveness?
- [11:08]
D
Thank you. Yeah, I think you're right. We've moved on beyond looking at it as just an environmental issue, environmental crisis. And we're looking at it more and more as a finance and economic problem. And we know the dependencies. We know hundreds of trillions of nature services go into our economy. We know 50% of our GDP is dependent on nature. But we're still really looking at this from a kind of risk side of things. What we need is a shift in our mentality from looking at it just as the risk, but also trying to explore the opportunities and really how do we leverage those opportunities. For me, the key thing is to really understand nature better, understand the relationships of nature with what we're doing, understand how we value nature. How can we integrate nature and what we're seeing those shifts. We're seeing those shifts in London Climate Week as well. I'm sure you've been to lots of talks which are talking about it. And we're seeing clearer pathways between nature and growth, nature and resilience and nature and, you know, fiscal and financial opportunities. And they're great examples. You know, the evidence is there. The WEF did a major report a couple years ago on if we do the transition, the nature transition, then we can unlock $10 trillion by 2030 and create nearly 400 million jobs. TNC, we recently did a, did a report called Nature Dividends. And we found for every dollar you Invest, you get $4 back. So that ROI is pretty high. And we've got some programs. One of them is a nature bonds program. And we do debt swaps. And we were sort of, when we do those programs, we ask ourselves the questions around the macro impact. And we did a program in Belize and we were doing mangrove protection, trying to protect 30% of the mangroves. And we said, okay, so what does this actually mean? And our analysis showed that the voided loss on itself would be equivalent to 1.5% of their GDP. So that's a big, big impact. So we're not just investing in growth, but we're also creating resilient economies which create resilient Communities which create resilient livelihoods. So that's been our experience and what we're finding is that where countries are trying to position themselves as the early movers, the ones which are doing, putting themselves as, you know, transitioning nature as much as they can, they're the ones who are going to enjoy the longer term growth, the longer term resilience, and enjoy prosperity much quicker than the others.
- [13:56]
C
So there are many ambitions, commitments, plans out there that we've heard about. You know, what does it take to actually move from those plans to actual like a pipeline of investable projects? What are some of the barriers you see in some ways to overcome them?
- [14:15]
D
And I think you've touched upon it before and I try to reflect on some of the kind of big, big numbers out there, right? The 700 billion climate, nature, finance gap. Right now I think we're at 200 billion per year and most of that is coming from public sector. But on the flip side, if you look at the global economy, you say how much is out there in the capital markets? It's like hundreds of trillions. How much are governments spending annually? 30 to 35 trillion. So the money is there, it's just not flowing where we want it to flow. So you have to ask yourself the question, what are the hurdles? And for me it's not just a capital shortage we're talking about here. We're talking about a finance policy gap which is failing to match our funds with nature. And when you go talk about the private sector and say what are they looking for? What are they looking for? So they're always looking for long term signals and commitment that will give them the confidence. And what do we mean by that? I think there's three main things for me. The first one would be around ambitious goals, of course, but then have you worked that into something which is workable through sector transition plans? And is that backed by a credible finance plan? Does it have credibility? Have you built the regulations and frameworks around it? And you know, is it consistent? You can't have law of changing regulations, different jurisdictions. Doing it differently makes it difficult for the private sector to scale. And I think the third thing is they want a demonstrated track record. So we're trying to move between perceived risk to actual risk and that will bring down the cost of capital. And that needs bankable projects. But also it needs public sector to put a bit of skin in the game and say we're going to use our public finance in a catalytic way. And I can give you a really great example actually. The Trends are really positive. So we've done a recent report on the trends of the private sector flows, and it's positive. So there's hope out there. Right. But it's still, we're still at the fraction of where we need to be. But over the last 10 years, we've seen a fivefold growth in private sector flow into nature, and we're seeing billions in the pipeline for more finance sector money going into nature. So we've got that momentum and we've got something really good to build on, and we know the hurdles. So I think there's a clear way forward.
- [16:52]
C
Well, you guys did get a shout out earlier today on your investments in nature. So thank you, Wakas, and thank you, the Nature Conservancy, for partnering with us on this conversation.
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D
Thank you.
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A
I want to turn back to you, Colm, because you had a big exclusive out earlier this week about some of the sort of behind the scenes contentiousness around the the idea of merging the UN Development Program, UNDP and unops. We're obviously in this era where there's a lot of discussion around UN reform and how agencies can be merged, how the UN can streamline and cut costs. So tell us a little bit about what you've learned on UNDP and UNOPS and what's playing out there.
- [17:35]
B
So let me step back for just a second. So last year, the Secretary General initiated what's called the UN 80 reform package. Three basic elements. One are areas where the UN Secretary General, under his own authority, can cut back funding, save money, hiring freezes, that sort of thing. The budget for next year spend for the regular budget has been cut by over 500 million. So that's one step they've taken in the reform. Second one is basically looking at all the mandates that member states have given to the UN over the last 80 years. There are thousands of them. And to sort of try to rationalize them, figure out where there's duplication, all that sort of thing. So that process is going on. The toughest one kind of was more far reaching in terms of looking at structural reforms. And the idea was, are there areas where there's duplication, where we can consolidate? And some of the most controversial sort of proposals from Secretary General were to merge two of the major development agencies, the UN Development Program, the UN Office of Project Services, which is usually usually kind of like a, you know, it's basically an agency that implements operations, projects, you know, infrastructure, that sort of thing. And so there has been an effort to sort of consider how would they bring those together Other areas where they're talking about mergers are the UN Population Fund, UN Women. There's talk about sunsetting UN AIDS by the end of this year. Right. So there's been enormous pushback. There's been pushback from member states who have questioned whether the mergers make sense from a programmatic point of view. Does it make the UN better at what it does? Is it just saving money? And will we undermine key mandates that the member states care about? And then there's been this issue of kind of basically turf battles within the UN system. Agencies that are being pushed emerge, that are kind of resisting. And so what I wrote about earlier in the week was, or last week was sort of the debate internally over the merger of UNOPS and undp. And I got access to a briefing that was sort of undertaken back in April by the senior leadership, including the Secretary General, the heads of all the major agencies, and basically the heads of UNOPS and UNDP went at it. UNDP is run by Alexander decruw, a former Belgian prime minister and a former businessman who is kind of focused on pursuing this initiative of basically absorbing unops, which was in a sense, created by UNDP many years ago back into undp. Maria da Silva, who is the head of unops, is, you know, is seriously opposed to that. I mean, this would be a move that would either demote him or end his role. But also he has argued that this is not a good idea and that what we need to do is create a whole new agency. So the two of them came out of it. They had different consultant assessments, different measurements of the money that could be saved. Very contradictory. The Secretary General had to kind of step in and referee the discussion and get them to come back with, you know, sort of a joint report on options that could be pursued or considered by the member states. They did that. They came back and in June, they had a public meeting which, with the UN Executive Board, which are the member states, had kind of provide oversight for a number of the agencies. And they were basically stuck where they were. They came out with four options, but they basically retreated to their original positions. They hammered. You know, they fought it out there. And like, my sense is that, you know, what this is sort of. It's providing kind of fuel for those in the member states who don't want these reforms, you know, so they can focus on the divisions within the UN over this. But basically, you know, there's kind of emerging sense of that this reform is not going to happen, that this, the mergers, not only in UNDP and unops, May not happen, but also UNFPA and UN women. There's a lot of internal opposition, There's a lot of member state opposition. You know, the Deputy Secretary General brought this up in a private conversation that she had, a town hall meeting she had late last year with the membership before, you know, staff at UNDP and kind of sending a warning to them where you, you know, we need to make these reforms ourself, and if we don't do it, someone else is going to come in and do it for us and the outcome is going to be worse. So I think that they're in that position now where there are real questions about whether they have the ability to do that. One other area which we kind of looked at, one of our reporters looked at this week, which was Jenny Lee Ravello, which she looked at unaids, and there is an internal report that was produced by kind of a working group this week, which also opposed the Secretary General's kind of call for sunsetting the organization and then just try to explore other ways of preserving the UN's focus on combating HIV. Right. And so, you know, maybe it would be shrinking the size of UNAID secretariat. Maybe the UN could house the capacity that's in UNAIDS in another part of the un. So a lot of kind of internal sort of division over how to move forward on what's been kind of a really important function for the un fighting aids. Right.
- [23:02]
D
Yeah.
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A
I guess one of my questions column is, as we look at this, how much of this Right. Guterres is getting ready to leave? You've written a lot about Nur continuing to sort of follow the race for the Secretary General to replace him? How much of this is tied up with, like, his potential waning power or is he. Or how much work is he going to put on this, given that he's sort of heading out the door?
- [23:26]
B
Yeah, I mean, yeah. So a couple of things. One is, I mean, this was a reform. You know, he had his big reform, which was in 2024, which was the pack for the future, which dealt with all these kind of futuristics about UN potential governance of AI of the digital space, looking at the reform of the international financial architecture system so that the Global south would have more of a say in how the fate of development climate issues were playing out. A lot of these things have kind of come off, have gone onto the back burner with the emergence of the second term of the Trump administration and pushed back on a lot of the issues that the Secretary General was advocating. And so, in a sense, to try to get ahead of the game and to signal to the Americans that the UN was serious about reforming itself and cutting back in terms of the amount of funding they pursued this initiative. But the initiative, it's kind of late in the game. It's feels to a lot of the membership like it's just reactive to U.S. pressure and that it's been pulled together in a hurry and that there hasn't been a lot of deep thought about how the reforms would actually make the UN operate better than it does now to do the things that the membership wants it to do better. That it's really focused just on numbers, cutting back, trying to get, you know, like bringing down the number of staff, cutting down programs and that sort of thing. So there was that. So going into it, he already faced that obstacle. And now I think as there is kind of division over where to go with these reforms that the member states are really thinking in terms of, yeah, well, maybe we leave this up to the next person, the next woman or man who takes over that job at the beginning of 2027. So it hasn't helped. And a lot of the analysis from experts on the UN have indicated that is in a particularly weak position now to deliver this.
- [25:23]
A
I guess two quick follow up questions there. One, do we know anything about where the current candidates stand on some of these proposals or on some of these reform efforts? And are there alternatives? What happens if these reforms don't go forward? Because we know that the UN is in a major financial crunch. Right. So some of this is driven, I think out of necessity because there is just less money. And so they have to figure out how to manage that. So I guess we have what, you know, if these particular set of proposals of reforms don't move forward, what, what happens next? What are some of the alternatives?
- [25:57]
B
Well, I mean, there have been previous efforts at reform that didn't succeed. There was a mandate review reform many years ago. Was it, I think 2015. And that was a very ambitious effort to try and, you know, rationalize these thousands of mandates. Right. And to figure out where there's duplication that pretty much failed. There was a hope too that they would have progress on this front this time around. I mean, my sense is that a lot of the member states are kind of, some of them are coming to terms with the fact that, for instance, on the development reform, on the development merger, that it may not happen. And they're looking for ways on the margins to come up with some agreement. So it's not a total failure. So maybe they could Find areas where, I mean, even UNOPS came up with this idea of doing a joint venture on specific issues like energy security with UNDP and they could focus on those issues together. Maybe there's other areas of back office administrative operations where they could join forces or they could consolidate that sort of thing. But the feeling that there's going to be a major merger, I think that's lost a lot of the steam that it had or the little steam that it had even a year ago. So that's, that's kind of where we, where we are.
- [27:17]
A
Yeah, interesting. Well, I think it'll be interesting to see if we do get some of those sort of very watered down agreements or where things go or, you know, what a future Secretary General might decide to do or what proposals they might put forward for reforms as well. Jesse, I wanted to come back to you because you're just home from the Hamburg Sustainability Conference on the back of covering London Climate Action Week last week. But I was hoping you could give us a sense of your sort of takeaways from the Hamburg Conference and sort of what, you know, what the conversation was, how it's different than some of the conversations maybe that you were having last week in London and what you learned.
- [27:58]
C
Yeah, it was a lot of conferences recently. This is my first time at Hamburg Sustainability Conference. It's only their third year of doing it and it felt for people who are familiar, it felt a bit like the Munich Security Conference. Which is the reason why is it was very small, very intimate and very high level. It was quite fun to just like sit on a couch and people watch because you're able to put faces to a lot of the names like Alexander Decru as Colin mentioned was there. And so it was a lot of just like run either running into people you know or running into people that you want to know. And obviously this one is focused on, focused on sustainability. So it was sort of, I mean compared to London Climate Week it's, it's a much more focused gathering. But honestly neither of them have an outcome document. It's not like a negotiation. There's no official purpose other than to drive momentum and have conversations. And I think someone from actually several people from different global south countries told me that they were there to sort of take the temperature of European countries and Germany in particular about what they're thinking about aid and what's going to kind of come next. And so it was a little bit of just feeling people out. There were a few sort of announcements that were made. One that I followed closely is Something called the, the South North Commission. And the ordering of south north is very intentional there rather than North South. And this is essentially a group of leaders from both south and north countries coming together over the course of one or two years and putting together kind of a, a report about, you know, what's, what's needed on debt and trade and climate finance and how to strengthen partnerships between the south and the North. And it actually hearkens back to the Willy Brandt commission from like 19, the 1970s, 1980s during a period of decolonization. It was essentially the same idea, but obviously with modern goals and challenges, it's still very light on details. We don't really know, you know, who there's going to be commissioners appointed. The, the two people who are co chairing it are the Olaf Scholz, the former Chancellor of Germany and Laura Chinchilla, who's the former President of Costa Rica. So we know them but beyond that we don't know, you know, which countries are going to be represented, how many. No one is going to, you know, this isn't a funding organization. There's no amount of money that they're going to give out. But there are meetings and get togethers and you know, they didn't give me a sense of what the budget's going to look like though. I believe it's all funded by the Development Ministry in Germany. And a few people were sort of like, we still don't really know why they're doing this and why it's being set up right now. And this really hits on like a larger theme that I've been noticing, which is now that ODA has fallen so much, so many of the top development thinkers are approaching this from a really like minute perspective. And this goes into this, this term country platforms that I keep hearing and I feel like most people don't really know what it is, is essentially just locally led development. Right? Like what do the individual countries need from the development community and how do we make sure that they're communicating that? And I think the South North Commission, I think the Coalition for Development that we've seen over the last year, this effort to like write reports and talk to people is sort of a chance to capitalize on the fact that the development system is, is faltering and that we need a new approach. And now all of these people are coming together trying to figure out what that approach might be. And it feels a little bit empty I think when you're first looking at it, because there's no money involved and there's no institution that's actually attached to these. These are just groups of people for a time bound period, like discussing what should come next. But a few people I talked to sort of showed me like the, the, the bright side of that, which is every country does need something different and if we can bring the right people together, maybe there is a more efficient way to get them what they need because the end of the old system isn't really here anymore. So, yeah, it was interesting.
- [31:52]
A
I do think it's been fascinating to see the proliferation of all these initiatives to try and define what comes next. It does kind of beg the question, to your point is like, I wonder how much money is actually being spent on all of these. Like, yeah, two dozen efforts to determine what comes next for foreign assistance. And I know we've written about a number of them and you know, obviously discussions worth having, discussions that we're having at our events. Right. About what the future looks like, because people are really trying to figure that out. But to your point, what is sort of the practical application? And I think often when you go to multiple conferences or summits in a row, your takeaway is like, okay, well what is the takeaway? Do people get together to talk? And maybe that has value, but what, what actually comes out of it?
- [32:39]
C
Yeah, I mean, there were moments there where I just saw the same people I just saw in London. We were just traveling together to a different city to have similar conversations in a different venue. And you get to this point where you're like, why are we doing this over and over again? Of course there's value to it, but it's definitely a question about how many of these we actually need and how much of it could be done remotely. And yeah, to your point about the coalitions, like, it's, maybe it's just going to take time because they're still figuring out what needs to happen. But from our, from like a journalist perspective, I'm like, okay, well, where's the money? Like, who's getting what money and for what? And that is not a conversation that I really heard.
- [33:19]
A
Yeah. All right, well, you know, I think we'll, we'll continue to watch some of this. I do think, you know, seeing how some of these conversations play out is interesting. But to your point, and I just, you know, participated in an event where we talked about sort of the first six months of the Trump administration's, you know, foreign assistance policies this year. And so many of the questions and so much of what we're tracking is really about the money and where it's moving because I think that will really start to tell the story, not just for the US but how institutions across Europe who have cut budgets and the MDBs, how they're moving money and at the UN as well. So a lot for us to to keep an eye on. But I wanted to thank you, Colm and Jesse, for joining me today. It's always a pleasure to have you on this week in global development.
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B
Thanks, Abbott. Good to be on.
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C
Thanks.