MONTHLY NEWSLETTER: JUNE, 2026 by TAI Collaborative

It’s been another busy month in development circles, including relevant conversations during a hot and sweaty London Climate Action Week and now at the Hamburg Sustainability Conference. Amid it all, an important reflection from Dan Banik on why we need hope in development - hope as a practice against the “doom machine” that it is all too easy for us to succumb to. You might want to read alongside this piece on closing the hope gap.

In addition to our roundup of news, research and events, we are excited to launch a new section, Deep Dive, where we invite readers to think more critically about what it means to reimagine development. This inaugural piece is written by Anthony Bebbington, International Program Director for Natural Resources and Climate Justice at the Ford Foundation.

We welcome your thoughts and feedback at roundablesecretariat@taicollaborative.org.

Warmly,Roundtable Team

Roundtable Latest

  • Stay tuned for our updated public version of the database of “Future of Development” related initiatives. Everyone will be able to suggest additions,

  • We will soon be sharing details of calls and fundable opportunities on priorities emerging from meetings during the spring. 

  • Our next Roundtable leadership conversations will take place during the UN General Assembly / New York Climate Week. Please share relevant events that you are organizing that week.

  • On June 23 and 24, we attended the Annual Policy Dialogue of the Club of Madrid. The central theme this year was strengthening global public goods in a fragmented geopolitical context. The key message of the discussions was how despite today’s major challenges, the world has never had greater knowledge, resources, or capacity to generate and protect global public goods—not only health, education, and infrastructure, but also democracy, equity, and climate security. So what is standing in the way? In our full readout, we explore the main barriers identified during the dialogue and outline specific actions philanthropy could take to help overcome them. 

What’s Emerging Across the Field: 4 Insights on the Four Shifts

Shift 1: Building a New Era of Development Cooperation

Can the next UN Secretary-General move beyond crisis management? Our Steering Committee member  Maria Kisumbi and Jordan Street highlight how in a moment of shrinking resources, investing in prevention and local capacities may be more important than ever. 

What if international cooperation were built on mutual contribution rather than donor-recipient relationships? A growing coalition of more than 30 countries is championing Global Public Investment as an alternative model for international cooperation—one where all countries contribute according to their capacity and benefit according to their needs. As traditional aid budgets contract, this vision offers a pathway toward a more equitable and multipolar system.

According to new OECD projections, official development assistance will continue falling in 2026, with the sharpest impacts likely to be felt by the poorest countries and health systems.  Want a sense of how to measure how much remaining assistance actually gets sent abroad, check out this analysis of UK government funding. 

What can we learn from India's rise as a development actor? Euan Ritchie and Ian Mitchell argue that India has quietly become one of the world's leading providers of development cooperation, signalling a broader shift toward a more diverse and multipolar development ecosystem driven by new actors from the Global South.

Shift 2: Remodeling Development Finance Flows

Why does the world still face a $4 trillion financing gap despite record levels of wealth? UNDP analysis argues that the challenge is not a lack of money, but the way financial systems allocate capital. The piece highlights reforms and financing approaches that have already mobilized more than $920 billion in SDG-aligned investment.

Three years after the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact, how much progress has been made in reforming the global financial architecture? An independent tracker shows that only one-sixth of the commitments have seen meaningful progress - a stark reminder that systemic reforms—from debt relief to multilateral bank reform—remain unfinished business.

Matthew Gutentag offers a useful collation of recent data and evidence tools for understanding blended finance, catalytic capital and the like - new mantras for development.

Amitabh Behar worries about the framing of aid being replaced by investment. When solidarity is mixed with geopolitical and economic interests, effectiveness can suffer - a reminder that financing decisions are inherently political.

Shift 3: Strengthening Locally-Led Development

What does it take to move from rhetoric to genuinely locally led development? A new guide translates lessons from collaborative learning sessions into concrete strategies for organizations seeking to shift power and strengthen local leadership, including for Global North intermediaries navigating their own transformation.

Richard Hawkes of Oxfam GB responds to an article by Halima Begum calling for the ‘dinosaurs’ of international aid to adapt. He argues that declining aid budgets should accelerate the transition toward locally led development rather than reverse it and calls for a fundamental rethinking of partnerships, placing local actors at the centre of decision-making and directing more resources to community-led solutions.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called for more global south voices in U.N. decision-making, warning that growing global conflicts and economic disputes are testing the effectiveness and credibility of multilateral institutions.

Yashodhara Rana, Sudip Pokhrel and Danielle Porfido advocate for a model of "government accompaniment," where nonprofits and funders work alongside public institutions to build long-term capability, enabling governments to lead and sustain change at scale. 

Shift 4: Improving Philanthropic Collaboration

Devex analysis explores the growing potential of locally blended finance—combining philanthropic, public, and private capital to mobilise resources closer to communities they aim to serve. David Njagi argues that locally led financing models could offer a more sustainable and equitable way to support development, while also raising important questions about who designs, governs, and ultimately benefits from these new financial architectures.

Biniam Bedasso of the Center for Global Development examines where philanthropic dollars for development are going - yes, it remains highly concentrated geographically and institutionally, but less duplicative than you might fear. He urges philanthropy should embrace, “smoothing the transition, testing ideas, absorbing early risk, building delivery and evidence systems, supporting regional platforms, and making underfunded countries or sectors more fundable over time.” 

Hadiel Ali and Andrew Friedman make the case for why a new ecosystem must emerge and offer recommendations specific to civil society, philanthropy, and the private sector.

Read the report from the AfricaXchange 2026! The paper argues that the sharp decline in official development assistance is creating both an urgent challenge and a strategic opportunity for philanthropy. Rather than simply filling financing gaps, the report calls on foundations to leverage their unique strengths—risk-taking, convening power, and flexible capital—to catalyse new partnerships and help shape a more resilient and equitable development ecosystem.

In Case You Missed It

Read the full report on the Wilton Park UNDP convening on Agenda 2063 Africa agency in a post ODA world.

Deep Dive: When Development Exceeds Philanthropy. How mega-development challenges philanthropic thinking on power and participation

By: Anthony Bebbington, International Program Director, Natural Resources and Climate Justice, Ford Foundation.

Development will have many futures. Some of those futures will rattle the cages of philanthropy and challenge our default positions. While much philanthropy tends towards calls for the local, participatory, and democratic, a great deal of what passes as development is mega, vertical, exclusionary and autocratic. Take your pick of examples currently being built out: the Chancay deep water port on Peru’s Pacific Coast and its potentially huge implications for the Western Amazon; the continuing iterations of the Regional Initiative for the Infrastructural Integration of South America, IIRSA; the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline; Indonesia’s Food Estate program; the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park. Beyond the tendency to question and critique such initiatives – for very well-founded reasons – it is worth asking how far we have really let their implications seep into how many in philanthropy think of our day-to-day work: I am not sure that I have.

Take the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park, or IWIP, in Central Halmahera, North Maluku. On a bay that, less than a decade ago, was the home of village fishing grounds, and not so very far from Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact-the O’Hongana Manyawa - now stands an industrial complex that hosts nickel ore smelters and processing plants, associated industries and support services, an airport, social facilities and a large coal-based power plant built to provide electricity to all these operations. IWIP has already generated some 80,000 jobs, and according to local authorities, IWIP plans to grow several fold in the coming years - the IWIP masterplan says that its total land area will reach 5.000 hectares. This industrial complex drives large-scale supply operations, and the Bay that not long ago was the territory of small-scale fishing boats now hosts at any one-time dozens of ships and ocean barges waiting to deliver coal, nickel ore, food supplies and other goods to the Park.     

The nickel ore comes from a fast-expanding footprint of open-cast mines across Halmahera and other islands in the Maluku archipelago that is progressively turning green landscapes into lateritic red in the service of downstream industry - a strategic national project to industrialize nickel ore production to supply electrification projects internationally and nationally. The sky above the bay is now painted by plumes of steam and emissions, and bright night illumination. In essence, a whole industrial city has landed in a not long-ago remote corner of islands famed for their role in the global spice trade (especially of cloves and nutmeg) and for being at the center of Alfred Wallace’s independent contributions to the theory of evolution by natural selection.   

Of course, landscapes have industrialized and transformed many times in the past – I proudly come from one such landscape in the UK and appreciate the social, cultural, and economic creativity of industrialization. These industrialization transformations are not just ones of “dark satanic mills” transforming “green and pleasant lands” as William Blake would have had it. However, not many landscapes like this appear in less than a decade, and historically, they were not produced through the diktats of coordinated central authorities. One can only marvel at the remarkable efficiency of those who built this landscape (in this case a coordination of the Tsingshan group and the Indonesian state) and also at the efficiency of local and migrant labor markets that bring in eighty thousand workers so quickly, and somehow manage to house and feed them through the markets, eateries, hostels, micro-apartments and other accommodation that have grown quickly in villages within a two hour commuting radius from IWIP.

The new asymmetries of power that these transformations introduce into these landscapes are similarly breathtaking. How do fisherfolk, village leaders or even more so, Indigenous People, only recently leaving isolation, negotiate transformations on such huge and rapid scales when, for many, as a now dated but still important book framed it, they are viewed as being “In the way of development.” How does one imagine democracy or participation – or an idea of the “local” - in the face of such asymmetries and inequalities? 

These forms of mega-development are the ones that matter to states and capital – there is a reason that they are denominated projects of national interest, while education systems, climate financing mechanisms, and most of the sectors of interest to philanthropy are not. In contrast to the literature that distinguishes between the notion of “little ‘d ’” development, understood as the expansion of capitalism, and “‘big D’” development as intentional interventions pursuing normative goals (the stuff of grants and projects), the forms of megadevelopment like IWIP constitute both at the same time. They are simultaneously the stuff of capitalist expansion and very intentional, goal-oriented interventions. And while these types of mega, and often extractive, investments are not what many in philanthropy may mean when we say “development,” they are precisely what many others do understand as “development.” Any discussion of the future of development must recognize this, and think through how philanthropy engages with phenomena like IWIP in ways that neither constitute futile resistance (how do you resist a city?) nor end up simply making philanthropy functional to state and capital. The roots of this response will not be found in old discussions of alternatives or localizations. Philanthropy talks a lot right now about “meeting the moment”, an idea grounded in the notion that the cultural and socio-political terrain has moved irrevocably. IWIP and its many, many siblings across the globe similarly suggest that much that is understood as development has also changed irrevocably, and that these shifting grounds of development are themselves constitutive of the changing political grounds that so vex us.

Highlight of the Month

Watch the full video of the spring event at Stanford University on “Future of Development” featuring insights and ideas from Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman, economist and finance expert Vera Songwe, former Liberian Minister of Public Works Gyude Moore, and former Ambassador and USAID Administrator Mark Green. 

Events of Interest

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