Presented by Paris Peace Forum
The Trump administration isn’t exactly enamored with the United Nations, but that frosty relationship apparently comes with caveats.
Also in today’s edition: Has localization become a casualty of USAID’s demise?
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Most of the time, it seems like U.S. President Donald Trump opposes pretty much everything about the United Nations — but important exceptions may be emerging.
Despite the release of a 2026 budget proposal that nixed all U.S. funding for U.N. peacekeeping, it appears the White House hasn’t completely snubbed the Nobel Prize-winning blue helmets. It just wants to pick and choose where to deploy them.
My colleague Colum Lynch has learned that in recent weeks, White House budget director Russell Vought and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio have signed off on the provision of some $400 million to help underwrite the costs of peacekeeping missions in Lebanon and the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to a New York-based official familiar with the matter. The United States, meanwhile, has agreed to pay its share of the costs of standing up and running a 5,500-strong Gang Suppression Force in Haiti, an operation that is expected to cost several hundred million dollars to run each year.
Not everyone is a fan of the pick-and-choose approach, but the U.N., facing a massive cash crunch, may be happy with whatever scraps it gets.
“This tactic shows that the Trump Administration has no problem instrumentalizing the UN - supporting only some of its peace and security efforts while disregarding the rest,” Daniel Forti of the International Crisis Group tells Colum. “The UN is so desperate for cash that it might take the money and avoid making a public fuss about Washington’s remaining [funding] balance. Although this may briefly improve UN peacekeeping’s financial liquidity, it would send a worrying signal to other countries that’d prefer to pay for blue helmets a la carte.”
Read: Trump administration to unlock hundreds of millions for UN peacekeeping
Transforming our food systems so that we can feed a growing population of nearly 10 billion by 2050 without destroying the planet will come with a price tag of somewhere between $300 billion and $500 billion.
That’s according to the scientists behind a landmark report released last week in the Lancet medical journal, in which they lay out how to cut greenhouse gas emissions from food systems by more than half. Just where that money would come from was the question on everyone’s mind last week in Stockholm, Sweden, at a conference timed with the report launch.
As for who will pay: “It’s got to be everyone, everywhere, all at once,” said Anna Lappé, executive director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, a group of philanthropic foundations. That means international financial institutions, the private sector, governments, and everyone in between.
“We’re in a moment of transition where we have lots of innovation all over the world, lots of great models [for financing systemic change], and it’s a moment to bridge all that innovation to scale,” said Amit Bouri, CEO of the Global Impact Investing Network. “And I think impact investing can play part of that role.” But amid today’s geopolitical crises, getting anyone to invest in global public goods with such high upfront costs — especially when the payoff may not be seen for many years — is a tough ask.
The business case for investing in transforming food systems is actually very clear, countered Máximo Torero, chief economist of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. “It’s not enough to understand the benefits in the present value of today, but it’s also important to understand how we can put incentives together to create cooperation,” he said.
He pointed to the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, a G20 initiative launched by Brazil last year, as an example of bringing together financing, governments, and proven policies that work. “Because if we don’t coordinate and we don’t cooperate,” he said, “we won’t be able to achieve the goal.”
ICYMI: Planet at risk — new EAT-Lancet report warns food system overhaul is vital
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Last year, the development community was hyper-focused on realizing the ever-elusive dream of localization. This year, it’s just trying to stay afloat.
But a new Council on Foundations survey offers a flicker of hope that localization won’t get waylaid by the foreign aid cuts that have rocked the sector — at least among philanthropies, despite the attacks lobbed by the Trump administration at a number of them.
COF polled a small group of global grantmakers, including those that signed onto a donor pledge to advance locally led development in 2022. While the development landscape has become unrecognizable in the two years since the pledge was released, the survey confirmed that the commitment to channel more resources and decision-making power to local players has not wavered, Devex contributor Lauren Evans writes.
However, Natalie Ross, COF’s vice president of membership, development, and finance, cautioned that the survey is not comprehensive — only 29% of those invited to complete it actually did — and COF did not independently verify the self-reported data. And in the past year, only two pledge signatories — the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation — have publicly released their targets for localized funding.
Read more: With USAID gone, do foundations still care about localization? (Pro)
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Between the movement to localize development and the steep cuts to foreign assistance that have crippled the sector, what role is left for international nonprofits to play? INGOs were already widely seen as ossified relics of a bygone era before the cuts upended everything. Could this make them even more irrelevant and embattled?
Gina Lagomarsino, president and CEO of Results for Development, began thinking about this thorny question back in 2017, when R4D pivoted its mission to put local changemakers at the heart of its work strengthening health, education, and nutrition systems.
Today, she believes INGOs have a critical role to play, albeit a more supportive, specialized one focused on technical assistance, including on-demand expertise and collaborative learning.
“We spent a lot of time back then going out and talking to, especially the government leaders that we were working with around the world, to ask them: What is it that you want? What is it that you need from us?” Lagomarsino told me recently at Devex Impact House.
“And what they said was: We want to develop our own plans. We want to design our own priorities, and we do need some support. We want to learn from our peers around the world who have grappled with similar challenges. We do care about evidence and expertise from around the world, but we really want to own the systems change for ourselves,” she said.
So R4D created models where global peers could learn from one another. “For example, we work with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and help them manage their network of middle-income countries who really want to learn from each other — how to introduce new vaccines, how to prevent backsliding on vaccines — and that's the best form of assistance that they can get,” Lagomarsino said. “It’s actually talking to each other and learning from each other.”
Read: Between aid cuts and localization, what is the role of the INGO today? (Pro)
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In the first half of 2025, the amount of energy from renewable sources such as solar and wind has overtaken coal-generated power globally for the first time. [The Guardian]
Former Egyptian tourism and antiquities minister Khaled El-Enany will be the new head of UNESCO. [Reuters]
Twenty-five years after a U.N. resolution on women’s full participation in peace processes, women are still often excluded from peace negotiations even as sexual violence against women and girls surges. [AP]
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