Watch: Understanding the UK's new international development strategy

The United Kingdom’s new international development strategy was finally published last week. Coming on the back of shock cuts and changes to U.K. aid, and beset by delays, the strategy was long-awaited and finally landed in the midst of several global crises, including the war in Ukraine, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and worsening food shortages globally. Did it rise to the occasion? “There are some good components,” Abigael Baldoumas, policy and advocacy manager at Bond, the U.K. network for NGOs, told the audience at a special Devex Pro Live event last week. But overall, “we’re disappointed at the lack of ambition and the way in which this strategy makes more clear than any previously how much development is now going to be in service of foreign policy and of the U.K. national interest, and that feels like an abdication of leadership on the part of the U.K.” Baldoumas joined a panel alongside Devex’s U.K. Correspondent William Worley and Center for Global Development policy fellow Ranil Dissanayake shortly after the strategy was published, to discuss the ins and outs and what it could mean in practical terms. Read on for the key takeaways, or scroll further to watch a full recording of the event. Geopolitics One of the biggest headlines from the strategy was the clear focus on geopolitics and its influence on how the U.K. would spend aid. “It almost upends what we’ve come to expect about the logic of making decisions about development,” Baldoumas said. “So [normally] we’re putting the furthest behind first, addressing the needs of the most marginalized, the poorest, etc. … That is still there, but that is now firmly behind addressing the U.K.’s geopolitical concerns. And I expect we will see, when we eventually find out where funding has been allocated geographically, how that has played out.” Dissanayake also noted the shadow of China and its grip on infrastructure funding and investment in the global south. Although it isn’t named in the strategy, there is a clear attempt to compete with it. However, given China’s vast resources, and the U.K.’s relative lack of experience in infrastructure funding, he noted, this may not be a wise approach. “It would have been much more sensible to focus very much on the things that the U.K. does have a very clear comparative advantage in … [or] where we have space to act,” he said. For example, he suggested, this might include helping partner governments demand the right kind of transparency from investors, helping them to negotiate better deals, or using the U.K.’s influence with multilaterals to position them as best-in-class infrastructure investors. Focus on trade and investment Another clear element of the strategy is the heavy focus on trade and investment. Worley noted that Foreign Secretary Liz Truss had previously served as international trade secretary and Dissanayake remarked the new emphasis on economic development as displaying her influence. “On some levels there is a really strong logic for investment, for bringing in the private sector, for focusing on trade,” Baldoumas said. But what’s missing from the strategy is the more traditional ODA, as she put it, “what sits alongside the investment and the trade, and delivers the core of what we currently think of as international development.” For Dissanayake, one of the best parts of the strategy is the pledge to improve access to U.K. markets for low-income countries. “That’s probably the best thing the U.K. could possibly do to help the economic development of poor countries — import more from them, buy more stuff,” he said. But with good existing access for the lowest-income countries, “the devil’s in the details,” he said. He also raised issues around plans in the strategy for British International Investment to increase its spending considerably. He questioned how many bankable opportunities there are in the global south that financial institutions are currently overlooking, and which the U.K. can step in to finance. Rebalancing bilateral spending With the new strategy, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office says it hopes to spend three-quarters of its aid budget bilaterally by 2025, reducing the proportion of the budget that goes through multilateral institutions. This is in part a rebalancing to the status quo, Baldoumas noted, since the aid cuts disproportionately affected bilateral aid — but it also goes further than this, since bilateral spending stood at about 68% before the cuts. “A lot of this seems to be rooted in an assessment of the World Bank in particular, rather than core multilateral funding as a whole,” she said, noting a concern that “really important global initiatives” such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria “will get caught up in this shift.” Dissanayake added that “for the objectives we’ve set out in this strategy — infrastructure, global health, climate change … there are already multilaterals that are set up to deal with these things, and an efficient and effective way of addressing them would likely be to use the multilateral system to do so.” In addition, he said, if the U.K. does soon return to spending 0.7% of gross national income on aid as planned, it would make sense to put that extra money through multilaterals in the first instance, due to capacity limits within FCDO. However, both speakers said that how the money is used is more important than whether it is spent bilaterally or multilaterally. MIA: Open societies Although civil society as a whole was critical of the Department for International Development and Foreign and Commonwealth Office merger, which produced FCDO, it was hoped that the blending of development and diplomacy would lead to more effective work on issues such as human rights, freedom, and open societies. This has also been a historically strong area for the U.K., and in recent times has been identified as a priority. However, it is barely mentioned in the strategy. This was a surprising omission, Baldoumas said. “Given the foreign secretary’s emphasis and rhetoric around freedom, it is surprising and disappointing how little this strategy leans into that space,” she said.