As aid is being pulled apart, Germany needs to fight back

For the first time in nearly three decades, the world’s major aid donors are all cutting their development budgets simultaneously. The United States has dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development. The United Kingdom has slashed spending, and France has pulled back. Germany’s core development budget has fallen from €12.4 billion in 2021 to €9.9 billion. The real crisis isn’t the budget cuts, severe as they are. It’s that the political case for aid is collapsing from both sides.

Progressives have loaded every global challenge onto development budgets — climate, migration, health, conflict, gender — demanding that aid address all of them simultaneously. As the historian Adam Tooze has written, the Sustainable Development Goals represent an attempt to organize the world around a spreadsheet of universal values rather than politics. In Germany, for example, projects targeting four or more SDGs have increased nearly tenfold in a decade.  The result: Aid tries to do everything and achieves less.

Conservatives have rebranded aid as a means of achieving domestic goals, such as curbing migration, promoting national firms, and securing geopolitical leverage. While these goals serve the national interest, it is far less certain that development aid is the most appropriate means of achieving them. The mutual benefit framing sounds pragmatic on the surface. A study by Public First exposes its limits: In France, National Rally voters identified reducing migration as a key benefit of aid — yet most also believed aid fails to reduce migration, and may even increase it. The pitch designed to win over skeptics does not actually convince them.