 Hi, welcome to the wider webinar series. My name is Rachel Gisselquist. I'm a senior research fellow here at UNU-Wider. And I'm very pleased to chair this session today on the future of development aid in the post-COVID world. Aid and development, of course, is a topic that we pay some attention to here at UNU-Wider. In our current work program, we have activities, for instance, on democracy assistance and on aid and state building. And so we're really looking forward to the discussions and reflections today. The webinar will begin with a presentation by Professor Miles Wickstead, aid and development, where we are, how we got here, and where it might all go. And this will be followed by a presentation by Dr. Nelima Gulrajani, who will respond to and build on the presentation. So Professor Wickstead is currently visiting Professor in International Relations at King's College London, an honorary associate professor at the Strategy and Security Institute University of Exeter. He has a long history of involvement with international development in Africa, including serving as head of the British Development Division in Eastern Africa, serving on the board of the World Bank, and as British ambassador to Ethiopia, Djibouti and the African Union. His recent book, Aid and Development, A Brief Introduction, was published by Oxford University Press in 2015. Dr. Nelima Gulrajani is a senior research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, ODI in London, an associate fellow at King's College Department of International Development. She's currently on secundment at the Canadian International Council and the G20 research group at the Monk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Her work applies organizational and management theory to the field of international development cooperation. So welcome to both of you. For those joining us today, you might notice that your microphones are currently muted, but we would encourage you to send questions through the chat and Q&A functions that you should find at the bottom of your Zoom screens today. And after the presentations, we'll open it up to discussion as time permits. And I hope we can do this. We'll ask some of you to pose your questions live and I will unmute you for that purpose. So without further ado, let's turn it over to Miles, please. Thank you so much, Rachel. When I got through the first hurdle, which is to remember to unmute myself, which we still do, don't we, these days. So I'm going to spend 15 or 20 minutes, if I may, just running very quickly through a kind of history of aid and development and how we got to where we are today and then begin to open up some of the challenges and opportunities that are open to us. And Nalima will, of course, add flesh to those bones. So clearly there's been a very long history of sort of charity, philanthropy, et cetera. Paul Valérie has just written a book around two and a half thousand years of philanthropy and charity appears, of course, in all the sort of religious texts going back a long time. But I think it's reasonable to point to the beginning of the way we think about aid and development towards the end of the Second World War. And this notion of development, supporting countries to get back to or to reach norms really start as a construct from the Second World War and rebuilding Europe after the devastation. And two sets of institutions were created before the end of the Second World War, which remain very much in force today. The political organization of the United Nations created on the west coast of the US and the so-called Bretton Woods institutions, the world, the IBRD, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund, the so-called Bretton Woods institutions created on the east coast of the states. And their initial role, of course, a lot of it was about recreating a peaceful and more stable and more secure world after the devastation of conflict, but also providing the resources and help required for Europe to return to normality, to rebuild it after the devastation of the conflict. And the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the clue is in the name, initially focused very much on rebuilding war-torn Europe, supported very much by the US and the so-called Marshall Plan, which put a huge amount of resource and energy into helping to rebuild the countries of Europe. Now, the whole debate has to be seen in the broader sort of political international context at the time. And the end of the Second World War, of course, signalled the beginnings anyway of a quieter sort of conflict, an ideological conflict, the Cold War. So the whole notion of aid and development became linked in to supporting your friends, giving them resources to build up their economies as part of that ideological struggle. And the second very important factor that was sort of there after the Second World War through the 50s and 60s was the decolonization process. Many, many countries in Asia and then subsequently in Africa gaining their independence in the late 50s and in the 1960s. And of course, wanting to maintain the relationships with the former global powers, like the UK, like the Spanish, like the Portuguese, like the French and others. So there were natural links between, as it were, the global north and the global south. And these are terms which I know Nalima will be taking to task and looking at in a very sort of critical way when she comes to her presentation. But basically, we saw the rich world and the poor world in those days, the rich north and the poor south. And it was complicated by the east-west dynamic, the sort of communist east and the capitalist west to put it in very simple terms. And aid relationships were formed within that overall political context. Issues like human rights weren't so important. They didn't really feature. The important thing for the aid relationship was on which side of the political divide that relationship was formed. That's not to say that serious thinking wasn't going on about poverty, about serious economic development for the partner countries. And within the OECD, within the Development Assistance Committee, that thinking was going on. And in 1970, an agreement was made that the developed countries, the members of the DAC, would contribute 0.7% of their gross national income to international development. So that was done then. And a few years later, the British government actually wrote a white paper called More Help for the Porist. So this notion of getting to poor people, helping them to develop as well as poor countries, was there from the beginning, but was overshadowed perhaps by that ideological framework which I've mentioned. A lot of aid and development then, very much about infrastructure development, about economic support rather than getting right down to the grassroots level. Now, a couple of really important historical events happen subsequently. First, the end of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. And that, as it were, took away that ideological framework within which people had thought about aid and development previously. And a condition for a number of the countries in Eastern and Central Europe to become part of the international community, to join the European community as it then was, et cetera, were to improve their record on human rights, to democratize, to have free and fair elections, et cetera, et cetera. This is what many of those countries wanted to do anyway. And they put those into effect with support from the West, but largely under their own steam. And people began to think, well, if these are the conditions that have to be in place for us to have aid and development relationships with them, then perhaps we should be thinking more about these countries in relation to that relationship with countries in Africa, with countries in Asia, et cetera, et cetera, and the emerging economies. And so those considerations around rights, democratization, et cetera, et cetera, became much more embedded into the practice of aid programs. And in the 1990s, a number of key international conferences took place around food and right to food, around education, around health. And by the middle of that 1990s, there was beginning to be a sort of movement around a set of international development targets, which focused very much on poverty, poverty reduction, and very much on basic health and basic primary schooling for children and bringing girls in particular into primary education. Those international development targets became enshrined subsequently in what we call the Millennium Development Goals. Agreed actually in 2001, but with those very same principles at their heart, halving the proportion of people living in absolute poverty by 2015 and making significant progress on a number of indicators as I've suggested around basic health and primary education. It took a little while for those to take root. It took four or five years for them to really become entrenched, but it did happen. And many emerging economies, developing countries, took them to heart and began to put them at the centre of their development strategies. Now, there was another big shock a little bit further along the road, and that was of course the 2008 financial crisis. That kind of model of the world and how it worked, the Rich North, Poor South model, began to look increasingly dodgy as time went on, because after 2008 and 2009, what became increasingly apparent was that the economies of the so-called Rich North were in serious jeopardy, and many countries in the so-called Poor South were doing extremely well with economies growing at seven, eight, nine, 10% a year through their own efforts, through their own volition. Of course, in China and India, but in many other countries in Southeast Asia as well, and in Africa. So by the time we got to 2015, the world looked really a very different place from it had looked even 10 years before, but certainly 20 years before. We had a sense that the world was making progress, and if you looked at the targets, the millennial development goals and the progress against those, well, two or three years before their end date, we had succeeded between us in halving the proportion of people in the world living in absolute poverty. We had made progress against all the other goals, some of it very significant in terms of education, getting children into school, others less significant on some of the health issues, but nevertheless, there was real progress. And I think that that sense at the end of 2015 was a pretty positive one. People had an international outlook. We had had the financing for development conference. Above all, we had had two huge major conferences which had led to international agreements. First of all, in September 2015, the agreement on the sustainable development goals as part of that discussion. And second, of course, the Paris Agreement on climate change at the end of the year. So things looked pretty good at the end of 2015. The world was globalization was there. People generally saw that as a positive force. We had agreement on these sustainable development goals and they're up on the screen there. Everybody will be familiar with them. It's not always possible to remember what they all are and all the 169 targets underneath them, but think of them as the five Ps, of people, of prosperity, of planet, of peace and of partnerships. Because development is not just done by governments, but it's done by governments and civil society and the private sector. And the big difference between the sustainable development goals and their predecessor, the millennium development goals, is that these are universal goals. They're for everybody. They're not just for poor countries, rich countries, middle-income countries. Everybody has to do them or everybody signed up to do them and they are reviewed regularly and that has happened at the UN over the past four or five years. After the end of 2015, the world changed in many ways. I think, first of all, the political environment is so important. And I think in the US in particular, there was a more inward-looking dynamic which came into play. I think in the UK as well, there was a more inward-looking dynamic which was reflected in the decision to leave the European Union. And perhaps less focus than there had been before on rights and democratization. And I think many sort of leaders in other parts of the world took their lead from this. And I think we have seen a strong increase actually in strongmen running their countries, paying less attention to those critical issues around human rights, et cetera, over the past four or five years. And some of them using coronavirus as an excuse, frankly, to embed that power and to hang on to power when they should have given it up before. So the old dynamic of aid and development of rich and poor of North and South and East and West really is gone. We have to think of this world of ours, the only world we have as being one for which we are all responsible in equal measure and to which we all need to contribute to turning it into a better and more secure and more stable place. And I think coronavirus has really helped to sharpen the choices that we face. As I mentioned before, in some countries, it has heightened that sense of let's look after ourselves, let's look inwards. We need to protect ourselves before we protect other people. But I think coronavirus has also generated a much stronger sense that we can only address global problems through global cooperation. And whether you're talking about pandemics like coronavirus or you're talking about other existential issues like climate change, it is only possible to address those issues by working together. And those people who are fearful about their health or whatever and want to shut people out need to recognize that you can't do that. And the only way in which you can assure health globally is to make sure that everybody gets access to vaccines or whatever globally. So this, and I'm leading into the presentation that Nalima will make shortly, this leads us into certain ways in which we need to think differently about how the world is and how it operates. The power structures of the world are still pretty much reflected in the power structures that existed back in the mid 1940s. So the United Nations system, for example, still dominated by the Security Council, the five permanent members, they're very much reflecting the sort of power dynamic of the mid 1940s. The Development Assistance Committee of the OECD, which has done some brilliant work over the past 70 years or so, but needs to take into account more, I know they're trying to do this, the views of the non-members of the Development Assistance Committee. How can we create the structures that will allow all countries in the world to have an equal say over this planet, which we all own and which we all have a duty to protect? So there's a lot of thinking going on around what those changes might look like, how all countries can be involved in this in a more equal way, how we can set up mechanisms which will move us towards a more equal political structure, but also a more equal financial structure. How about, for example, if instead of the better off countries moving away from the 0.7% agreement, how about if all countries contributed 0.7% of their income? And there are mechanisms now like the global fund, for example, where countries do contribute, even very poor countries, because they know they will benefit from this. So how about all countries contributing something to these funds, whether it's a single fund or a multitude of funds which will address issues that affect us all, like climate or environmental degradation or whatever. We need to move away somewhat from the old dynamic, the old way we have of thinking about things and think about things in a new way, which empower people. We need to recognise that as SDG5 says, this is also about equality. This is also about empowerment of people. It's not just about getting rid of poverty, but it's about taking account of equal opportunities, giving equal opportunities for all. So there are lots of ideas floating around at the moment about how that can be done, how we can reduce those inequalities, what sort of mechanisms might be put in place, how we can empower countries which have traditionally not had a seat at the top table to have more say in how we run this world of ours. So at that point, I'm going to hand it over to Nalima, who I know has been doing a huge amount of thinking around some of these ideas and the different sort of dynamic between donors, recipients in traditional terms, and then between us we will, Rachel, do our best to answer the questions which you will direct at us. I've no doubt. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thanks, Miles. You're a very tough act to follow. And the breadth of your knowledge and the sleep of the historical landscape that you've presented is really very impressive. I am going to just try and share my screen. So I've titled this presentation, Donorship and Flux, and I will touch upon some of the historical genesis of aid in it. But before I do, and in case I run out of time, the presentation is really structured around three main statements. The first is that the idea of Northern Donorship, particularly the normative context for Northern Donorship, is facing some serious headwinds. And I'm not going to be able to present all of them, but I'll present a flavor of them. The second point is that these headwinds are really weakening donor identities and what we understand to be good ownership. And lastly, and I think this point is at this point, is more conjecture than perhaps fact, but Donorship and through aid will be transformed in the process. But how is the question at this point? And as Miles said, there's several ideas out there, but I think it's still to be seen, particularly in the context of post-coronavirus world, what will happen to the idea of a donor and through it the idea of foreign aid. So what is Northern Donorship? And here's where I kind of revert back to the historical moment post-war, particularly point four of the US President Truman's inaugural speech, which problematized under development. And that really unveiled against the backdrop of a Cold War that was emerging and a desire to contain communism globally. Now, in the 1950s, the US sought to promote this idea of overseas giving and Paul Hoffman, the formal Marshall Plan administrator was sent out and then charged, charged with selling the idea of aid giving to European countries that had benefited from US aid a decade earlier. And by the end of the 1960s, all European countries had commenced some kind of program of aid giving beyond national borders with new organizations and new professionals, essentially creating a new institutional field, which we now call the global development space. But why did states become donors? So what was the motivation and the source of donorship? And I think it's twofold and Liam Swiss and I present this in a paper published in the Canadian Journal of Development Studies and an expound on it in a chapter in a book recently published by Rutledge called A of Politics and Power. But first is this idea of the status as a donor. So to be a donor really is to exercise power. The idea of being able to give a gift to use those Nassian terms was the source of legitimacy that reflects hard power of a state, the financial resources to do it as well as their soft power or the capacity to give those resources. And it signifies a country as a modern developed state, creating essentially a class of nations. So states are really negotiating their role identity and power vis-a-vis the international system at this particular moment. But a second way we might understand the rise of donorship is what it means to be a good donor. So as opposed to just having the institutional structure to act as a donor, it involves something about the norms and values around what good donorship would be. And David Lumsdain in his classic work talked about a moral vision and how moral vision has really shaped the global aid regime, its creation in particular. And so when I talk about Northern Donorship, I'm really referring to both the status of states as donors, wealthy countries as donors, but also status of being a good donor. And the idea of what Northern Donorship is, is really a product of interests and values of their time. And that can change over time. So what we saw in 1949 is very different from what we mean by Donorship in 2020. Now briefly, just to kind of articulate some of these headwinds that are challenging, the donor ship, the idea of donor ship that I think Miles left us off at 2015, if you're pointing to kind of the apex of progressive donorship. And I just want to touch upon two, but suffice it to say that they both exist at the domestic level and at the international level and are an interplay between those two levels of analysis, but at the domestic level, I think we cannot underestimate fiscal pressures and the role that fiscal pressures play in making it much harder to justify overseas expenditures to domestic taxpayers. And I think we saw this in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008 and we're seeing it again right now in the context of the coronavirus crisis. And this I attribute to several factors, but I think one could potentially argue that the SDGs, the universality of the SDGs gives justification to populist politicians in particular to say there are development needs at home and prominent economists like Angus Deaton have even argued that underdevelopment in inner city ghettos in New York City is equivalent to what you might find in the worst slums of Brazil, for example. So I think that potentially justifies this fiscal argument for cutting aid budgets. And I think also aid skepticism is another driver for the narrative for justifying aid and the kind of empirical evidence for it is continuously challenged. And in the UK, particularly if you're thinking about the UK context, I think the media scrutiny in particular of aid has been somewhat unfair, but also eroded public confidence perhaps in aid. One of the global pressures that I think we also can't underestimate is the shifting geography of global poverty. Not only is the purpose of a donor in middle income countries the source of ongoing debate, but also Southern providers of South-South cooperation are upending distinctions between donor and recipient and providing a source of competition for many a valuable source of competition for others, a more insidious one. And I think this plays itself out against rising Sino-American tensions, have always existed, and I think claims to a new Cold War might be exaggerated. And yet this tension blunts the practice and potential of aid and of donors as each side targets allocations to client states and offers a somewhat mixed record for development, per se. So these headwinds, what are they doing? What are they doing? And I think at one level, I think they're weakening donor identity. And you'll see the slide somewhat sad tale, but I think with the merger of DFID, we no longer have an independent development ministry in the DAC. And this merger was about political control of a budget and an agenda. And many conservatives, members of parliament have suggested that one could have safeguarded British values and interests through the existing institutional structure of DFID and the FCO with far less cost than that people. But the fact that DFID with its reputation and the size of its budget was vulnerable, I think really reflects the slow demise of donor identity since 2013 with the Canadian and Australian mergers, which and this identity is intimately tied with the aid project. I think another way one might think about a weakening donor identity is in terms of the rise of Southern providers of development assistance who reject calling themselves donors, importantly. They don't reject the idea of receiving Northern aid. In fact, the BAPA plus 40 declaration, which was a declaration of Southern identity and South-South cooperation really stated clearly that South-South cooperation is no substitute for North-South cooperation, but they do reject the identity of a donor. Even though 75 countries have domestic institutions of aid giving, some of which include the least developed countries, the world. And I think what's interesting is in contrast to a previous period of the DAC where maturing modern countries moved from donor to recipient, these emerging providers can have coexistent identities as both provider and recipient, which is very different from the earlier understanding of what it meant to be a donor and how one got to being a donor. A second way I think these headwinds are challenging, Donorship is in the meaning of Donorship itself. Northern donors are discursively presenting themselves as seeking mutual benefits or win-wins. So the idea of enlightened self-interest as opposed to a kind of purist moral vision is I think one of the big changes from the early post-war period. And I think if you look at donor strategies, which we have done through the overseas development index in various country profiles of how donors explain why they give aid, you will see an enlightened self-interest rationale prevalent in these narratives. And I think this is understandable. So I think in a world which is facing shared threats, disinformation, pathogens, climate change, but also intimately linked through travel supply chains, migration, wealthy states can no longer insulate themselves from the effects of events elsewhere. And Sarah Burmao in her book, Targeted Development has argued this, that the key to prosperity in wealthy states now increasingly depends on conditions and poor areas. And she distinguishes this from the Cold War period where the achievement of development was really inconsequential. It was actually the ability to cultivate allies that was more important. Whereas now the ability to deliver on development is very much in Northern country interests. At the same time as we have this logic of an enlightened self-interest, moral visions of donors are increasingly driven by a much more narrow parochial idea, a self-regarding ideal. And I think that this graph, which I've put up here shows that in the current principle aid index, the 2020 version of the principle aid index, we can show that donors are instrumentalizing aid for short-term gain based on a series of metrics that we've put in place. So the bulk of the donors have experienced a decline in their score with the 2017-2018 period. Principal nationalism would involve a commitment to unselfish public spirited behaviors, recognizing their long-term interests in achievement of development. But almost all donors showed a decline in public spiritedness on the index, suggesting some degree of instrumentalization, with interestingly sweet ending, particularly badly on measures of tide aid, especially informally tide aid. So where does that leave us? So just quickly, I think we recognize that donorship will be transformed as the balance between values and interest shifts, how it's defined and organized, so our open questions for the minute. And I think there are some coronavirus unknowns. So as countries hijack planes to divert ventilators and N95s to their last-minute highest bidders, I think one might have seen this as the end of global solidarity as we knew it. And I think we can see that in terms of how aid finance in particular is going to be under stress, at least of all due to the following GNI ratios for those countries that target their aid spending according to their growth. So I think we are likely to see 0.7 as a policy target diluted, if not perhaps, reconceived. And Miles suggested a few ideas of how we might do that. However, you might also see this epoch as an opportunity to the extent that we all share vulnerability to a very violent pathogen. And so you could potentially see global challenges framed as security imperatives. Negative externalities are much more obvious post-corona. And arguably sit within the mandates of the foreign ministries that now control the aid budgets. So they sit well within the kind of framing of foreign policy in particular. So I think we can expect to see multilateral commitments to flow to tackle global challenges. And I think there will be legacy effects of this crisis. And how that plays out are still unknown, but I think the mutual aid movement that we've seen in local communities to tackle the pandemic is something that we can build on. By contrast, vaccine nationalism might risk creating a risk to the bottom. We've shown that the world can mobilize resources at speed and scale for things that matter. And perhaps that can galvanize or reduce some of those fiscal pressures. Scientific collaboration is an unprecedented basis for global cooperation and localism has proven, I think. So what changes do we expect from bilateral programming? So I think there will be legacy effects, but I think there are also unknowns. So with that, I will close. There are a few references there. If anyone is interested or feel free to email me and happy to provide some. Thank you so much. Wonderful, thank you. So this is, you've both provided a lot of food for thought for all of us. I see there are some questions here in the Q and A, but I'd encourage those in the audience to please start and continue sending your questions. I have a number of questions, but I think why don't we turn over to one of the members of the audience? Let's hopefully this works here. I'll turn over to Rebecca Chinsley who has a question for both of you. Thank you both for your presentations. That was really helpful and interesting. My concern is how we make sure that aid goes to things that citizens need and want as opposed to what their leaders might say that their countries want. For example, a country like Nigeria, which is a democracy, the leaders might say that they want to build football stadiums because of the status that brings them. Whereas cities as large as Joss with millions of residents still don't have running water or reliable electricity. So how do we donors make sure that the aid is going to the goals of citizens rather than leaders? Thank you. Miles and Nalima, would you like to respond to this question or would you like to collect a few questions? Well, my brain can only hold one or two at a time, Rachel. I'm very happy to have a little crack at Becky's question there. I mean, this is difficult because donors get told off regularly for imposing, quote, conditionality, unquote, and saying precisely how aid funds should be used and trying to impose their own priorities on governments. I think just a couple of things. I think, first of all, that donors can reasonably expect countries emerging economies to have a strategy in place, setting out how they propose to take their countries forward in terms of economic and social development. Indeed, this really came into play in the late 1990s and in terms of their relationship with the World Bank, countries were asked to draw up these so-called poverty reduction strategy papers, PRSPs, to set out precisely how they proposed to take forward the development of their countries in response to concerns by the World Bank and the donor community that they could feed into that process and to develop country ownership. The other part of the question, how do we ensure that what governments ask for reflect what citizens actually want? I think the SDGs provide that framework for countries to consult their citizens about priorities. These are supposed to be consultative documents and an increasing number of countries the world over, including in Finland, but also in countries in Latin America, Ghana, in Africa, for example, have taken this point very seriously about a national framework for development with the SDGs at their basis. And SDG 16 is the crucial one, the one that was most difficult to get agreement on when the discussions happening around peace and justice and strong institutions. And there, there's lots of language around rights and around civic responsibility and getting consultation mechanisms going. I think all we can do as donors is to ensure that there are processes in place for democratic elections. None of us, the citizens, always get the precise governments we want. And sometimes when governments come into power, they do things that we haven't voted for those parts. But I think that's all we can expect, really, whatever state a country is in, whether it's had democracy in place for hundreds of years or whether they're new democracies. Thanks. Rachel, can I come in? Yes, please do. Great, it's a great question. And I think there are several layers to the problem that the question identifies. The first is you have elites at two levels. You have elites in the donor countries who are making decisions, which perhaps don't always match up with needs in developing countries. But then you also have elites of developing countries who potentially are intermediaries. The principle of sovereignty essentially limits the hands of the donor nation to be able to necessarily engage with the individual citizen to often those channels occur through the elites of those developing countries. But I think there are perhaps a couple of ideas that might be worth thinking about in terms of how to match donor desires for development with citizen needs. And I think the first is the channels of finance that are used. So I think the ability to give directly to local NGOs and civil rights movements, thinking women's movements, for example, in the context of gender equality is really critical. And some of the work that we've been doing has shown that even though most countries have formally untied their aid informally, the practice of aid giving is still very much tied to Northern NGOs, often the larger international ones. And so really creating conduits of finance to be able to at least work with small scale actors on the ground. And that's not an easy challenge. This issue of scale is another thing to be discussed. But nonetheless, I think thinking more critically about the channels with which we engage at the local level is important. And I also think there is value in coming back to these ideas of cash transfers as a potential way to give to the local level, the argument being that those at the local level are best place to decide how to spend that money and do tend to spend it well. So I think those might be two ideas to consider as well. Wonderful. So I wanted to jump in with a question that sort of follows on from this discussion. There's been a lot of discussion recently about a global decline in democracy, Freedom House, the varieties of democracy project, Civicus Monitor and so on have reported that we see sort of pronounced democratic backsliding since the early 2000s. And I wonder your thoughts on how aid fits into this. And especially sort of the impact of emerging donors in this whole possible trend. Because as you mentioned, there is concern that emerging donors have sort of different norms around aid and conditionalities and democracy and so on. So I wonder your thoughts on that. Miles or Nilema, please. Well, should I just, I'll kick in first and then I'll let Nilema give the real answer afterwards. But I think that kind of sort of liberal international consensus that built from the end of 1989 and which continued through the 90s and into the 2000s and perhaps came to a peak, as I said before, at the end of 2015, that consensus has been broken. And it's partly the Trump factor, I think has been, to be honest, has been a really important factor in this, that the US, which on the whole has been on the side of progress and development and putting resources in and caring about the state of the world, that has not been apparent over the last five years. And I think a lot of other countries have taken their cue from that, frankly. And so in Brazil or Hungary or various other countries across the world, leaders have said, well, if it's okay for the US to do that, we can do it, we can shift the dynamic in our countries too. I hope, I very much hope that we will see a change back and return to that sort of shift forward, a recognition that as a world, we're only going to make progress by inclusion, inclusion of governments but inclusion of civil society by everybody working together and recognizing that only thus are we going to make a world that we're going to be able to live in well. Thanks. Thanks. So I think this question is interesting. And I think I'm going to give one example of how donors see aid fitting into this question of democracy promotion. And then perhaps suggest that it might not be the right way and offer a potential alternative. So in terms of how donors are thinking about this, I just want to give the example of press freedom in particular in the sound. So there's clearly been a decline in press freedom globally and that's particularly been felt in many non-democratic states. And there's been an initiative launched by Illuminate, a large foundation to bring donors together to try and fund independent media in the global South recognizing that there are inherent challenges to their business model, particularly with the rise of platforms like Facebook and Twitter and so on, but also state-controlled media can provide a huge subsidy to state-controlled media. And so as a result, you have independent media really floundering financially. And so the idea is to create a fund to support independent media. Now the real challenge there is to what extent developing countries, sovereign states, are going to allow a global fund largely funded by the North and international institutions to transfer finance to the South to support independent media. That can be seen quite as quite threatening and a violation of the principles of sovereignty and non-interference that Southern donors or providers respect. And I pay respect in quotes because I think there are various examples of them not respecting that, but nonetheless, the normative discourse around what Southern provision is is very much one of non-interference, non-conditionality and horizontality. So I think there are fundamental problems with that, but I think donors themselves are grappling with that issue at the minute. Perhaps a better way, however, is for donors to be investing in a multilateral system that is more robust, that can engage in some of the conversations and those normative questions to build consensus around what democracy means, accepting its varieties across the world. And so perhaps that might be a more productive way to engage in those conversations than the idea of fund. Although I think the idea of working on something like media freedom also suggests donors are engaging in a much more politicized understanding of what AIDS is, potentially moving beyond the technocratic critique of AIDS, which I think is promising. I just think there's some certain structural weaknesses to the idea that might need to be grappled with. Great, thank you. So we have a couple of questions here. I think we have time for two more questions and I'm gonna ask the two people posing these questions to ask them live and then we'll give you a chance to respond together to those questions in our last 10 minutes here. So I think I'll turn first to Ricardo Santos, if I may. Ricardo, are you there? Hello, can you hear me? Hi Ricardo, we hear you. Hi, thank you. So first of all, thank you for the presentation. It's very talk provoking. So it may be a little bit unfair, but I felt that to a great deal, the presentations offered a perspective of how narratives mostly and practice changed from the perspective of an increasingly wider and diverse group of donors. But has the experience of said recipient countries and communities changed that much? So are there any signals that the power of the gift is waning and that donors are indeed improving their practices, namely in terms of predictability, coherence and temporal consistency? Or as I registered years ago as a development studies student hearing of a wise researcher, ownership is still a mantra in development because we are still way too far from making it real. Thanks, Ricardo. So we have another question here from Irene and I'm trying to ask her to unmute. Let's see if it works. If not, I'll pose the question. Okay, well, the question is, yes. Oh, Irene, there you go. Yes, so this is Irene together with a few colleagues from Nairobi, Kenya. Hello. Just looking at the different models that seem to be emerging in terms of development aid. There'll be a comment around this because there's a different approach if you look at how maybe there's Scandinavian countries, this is Sweden predominantly, and the other Western countries are approaching aid at this point in time. Maybe any perspectives from the panelists on that? Wonderful, thank you. So over to you, Miles Anuima. I could start, since Miles has started a few, I don't actually see Miles anymore on my screen, but... Yeah, I don't see him either, but please start. No, so on the first question, unfortunately, I don't think there's much evidence of donors changing their practices in terms of predictable financing and some of the other metrics you suggested. And I think I saw a recent table, I think pulled from the GPDC, which is the kind of aid effectiveness monitoring that really was sobering on that score. But what signals do we see from recipient countries? I think that's the really interesting space for change. You're right, we're very much looking at the supply side. And I think the word of aid and donor leads you to look at the supply side, but I think that the demand side for lack of a better word is where the change is maybe more dramatic. And I think the rise of Southern providers of development assistance in particular is changing the terms of the conversation between North and South. And if anything, I think recipients or Southern actors have the upper hand at the minute. I think there are some worries that the current global context is resulting in convergence to norms and standards that are not up to the traditional standard of what we mean by ownership, whether that be the financial commitments or the values of partnership or ownership, as you say. And I think that those are valid concerns, but those are being driven partly by I think what's happening on the side of Southern providers and the normative justifications that they provide for engaging in other countries of the South. I probably didn't answer your question fully, but hopefully gives a flavor of where I'm coming from. On the Nordics, the source of their uniqueness. I'm not an expert in Nordic aid history, but there is, I know in the context of the way their development aid ministries have been organized in particular, the idea of a specialized agency focused on development is very much in keeping with constitutional tradition in Scandinavia for several agencies and very few ministries. And agencies have a lot of power in Scandinavia and thinking of Sweden in particular, compared to ministries perhaps elsewhere in Sweden, but also in other parts of the world and have a lot of autonomy. And I think that is potentially one reason why they've been able to keep their development aid programs at arms like from some of the foreign policy imperatives, that otherwise tend to infuse development programming, that long constitutional history of separation of powers. I don't know if Miles has anything to add, but that would be my kind of historical view of some of the differences from Scandinavia. That's great. We seem to have lost Miles. I think there's been some technical glitch. So hopefully he can come in in the last few minutes to say some closing words. I'm wondering if I should take maybe one more quick question. Liam Swiss, I think has a question. We've got five more minutes, so pose it quickly and then we can get some closing remarks from Nilema. And hopefully from Miles as well. So Liam, please. Thanks Rachel. Thank you Nilema. Thank you, Ray, an interesting point in response to one of the earlier questions about the localization process that's kind of been pushed ahead a bit by the COVID context, right? The fact that Western donor agencies and their proxies and NGOs have not been able to travel and kind of be in different countries in the same way and we see localization and local actors may be stepping in to fill some of those gaps that evolved because of the pandemic. What do you think the prospects are for that continuing post-pandemic, assuming we get to some sort of normal again and if we see greater localization, what are the prospects for favorability of aid if it means diminishing role for the aid sector in donor countries? Thank you, I didn't fully understand the second part of the question that if we see localization. If there's increased localization and it means diminishing role for Western based NGO actors, consultancies, donors themselves. Yeah, great, thanks. Okay, so on your first, will it continue? I mean, the changes to the world of work generally are so dramatic. I can't see how we are gonna go back to any normal, frankly, what was before in any space of the world of work. And I think perhaps in the development sphere in particular, the combination of the climate crisis, in particular, I think really begs the question of the value of flying around the world for two day meetings. And I think technology has shown how we can still be engaged without necessarily being present. So I suspect that we are not going back to a previous world and that the localization trends that we've seen will continue in some form, certainly more than they were previously. And I think that does have implications for the role of Western based NGOs and actors, particularly in the context of shrinking aid budgets. I think donors like Difford, for example, are looking very carefully at who they want to invest in as intermediary channels. And the crisis that many non-governmental organizations are facing to cover their overhead costs in particular, is suggestive of, I think, a trend that will continue. And I think that might not be a bad thing. I mean, time will tell, but I think it does definitely open the door for greater horizontality between North and South and I think that is frankly, what is needed. Thank you, Nelima. So I just got a message here that unfortunately Miles has some internet issues. So I think that we will have to close the session today without him, but I thank both Miles and Nelima for your really thought provoking presentations and comments and the audience also for the questions. There are a couple more questions we didn't get to and I think that they'll be shared with you, you both after the webinar. So thank you, everyone. And I think now we'll close this wider webinar. Thank you very much.