- Convenors:
-
Mohammed Ibrahim
(University of Manchester)
Muhammad Dan Suleiman (King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals)
Fahad Albylwi (King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Reimagining development: From global cooperation to local agency
Short Abstract
This panel explores how Global South countries are responding to aid retrenchment by reimagining development cooperation, advancing South-South partnerships, and reclaiming agency to forge more equitable, inclusive, and mutually beneficial mechanisms of engagement in a post-aid era.
Description
Recent calls for equitable partnerships, decoloniality, and inclusivity reflect a recognition of the need to reimagine how development is conceptualised and practiced. Despite decades of reform discourse, the Global South continue to face entrenched inequalities, and the rules of engagement in international development cooperation remain largely shaped by the historically advantaged and ideologically dominant North. This raises the question of whether discourses on partnership and decoloniality mark genuine reform or simply re-echo development buzzwords destined to fade.
The retrenchment of aid from traditional donors - including the U.S. and U.K. - alongside the growing engagement of emerging donors such as China and Gulf states signals a profound shift in the global development architecture and geopolitical landscape. For instance, Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, with its ambition to diversify beyond oil, is reshaping the country’s global investment and aid strategies, offering new (if contested) models of partnership. These changes may present opportunities for the Global South to reclaim agency through new forms of South-South cooperation, regional integration, and resource nationalisation. The African Continental Free Trade Area exemplifies such efforts to “look within” and promote collective self-reliance.
This panel explores how Global South countries are navigating aid cuts and redefining mechanisms of cooperation that re-centre power, voice, and ownership. Key questions include:
●Does South-South cooperation offer viable alternatives to traditional aid?
●How can Southern actors avoid adverse incorporation and build mutually beneficial partnerships?
●What new institutions or mechanisms can promote inclusive, reciprocal, and balanced cooperation that reflects Southern priorities and agency?
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
Saudi Arabia-West Africa relations have evolved toward a more diversified development partnership in line with the Saudi Vision 2030. This paper traces that shift and positions Saudi–West Africa relations as a case for rethinking post-Western development partnerships amid declining global aid.
Paper long abstract
Saudi Arabia’s engagement in West Africa has evolved significantly since the 1960s. The last few decades have seen a shift from primarily religious and humanitarian outreach toward more diversified forms of development cooperation. Against the backdrop of aid retrenchment and the waning sustainability of traditional development finance, Saudi Arabia offers a useful case for examining alternatives to traditional partnerships dominated by the United States, Europe, and China. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the literature on Saudi–West Africa relations, tracing three key phases: the formative period of religious and humanitarian assistance (1960s–1990s), the expansion into infrastructure and education partnerships (2000s–2010s), and the post-2015 alignment with Vision 2030’s economic and geopolitical objectives. It critically engages with how existing scholarship frames Saudi engagement while highlighting gaps in analysis on non-religious sectors, aid effectiveness, and recipient country agency. By situating Saudi–West Africa relations within broader debates on alternatives to development finance in an era of shrinking aid flows, the paper underscores both the opportunities and risks of emerging modalities of partnership.
Paper short abstract
China’s new aid agency CIDCA shows how emerging donors respond to shifts in development cooperation. Applying hybrid professionalism to policy documents and elite interviews, the paper shows how CIDCA blends domestic priorities with international standards while pursuing reforms and adaptation.
Paper long abstract
With traditional donors scaling back aid and demands rising for new South–South partnership models, debates have increasingly centred on the institutions and mechanisms emerging donors create to organise development cooperation. This paper examines how a new state-led development agency in the Global South navigates changing dynamics in development politics. Drawing on the theory of hybrid professionalisation, this analysis examines the institutional development of China’s International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA) since its establishment in 2018, focusing on how professional authority, service routines, autonomy, and legitimacy are constructed under dual pressures from domestic strategic priorities and international standards.
Empirically, the study is grounded in qualitative analysis of policy documents and elite interviews with practitioners involved in China’s development cooperation. The findings suggest that CIDCA has pursued a hybrid model of professionalisation: it selectively combines domestic development strategies with international standards to strengthen coordination and retain flexibility. This approach has enabled reforms through small-scale project modalities, multilateral engagement, and more systematic evaluation practices. At the same time, institutional constraints persist, including incomplete structural adjustments and limited implementing powers. Shaped by inherited domestic arrangements, these constraints point to the need for continued adjustment and adaptation as CIDCA seeks to consolidate its role as a development agency.
By treating CIDCA as an institutional response to a post-aid landscape, the paper contributes to debates on how emerging donors build new mechanisms of engagement—and the limits of such hybrid arrangements for equitable, mutually beneficial partnerships.
Paper short abstract
The study employs a qualitative method to investigate the impact of U.S. aid retrenchment on Nigeria’s socioeconomic development, as well as the opportunities and risks of intensifying partnership with China as an alternative to fill the aid gap.
Paper long abstract
On 1 July 2025, the U.S. Secretary of State announced the formal end to USAID operations. This signified a reduction of aid to Nigeria, which has enjoyed progressive development cooperation with the U.S. since 1960. This decision portends a risk for Nigeria’s development trajectory. U.S. assistance to Nigeria constituted more than half the foreign assistance received from development partners. U.S. aid accounted for only 0.26% of Nigeria’s GDP. It played a significant role in Nigeria’s health and humanitarian sectors. UNICEF warns that millions of Nigerian children risk losing access to lifesaving support. China offers a mutually beneficial partnership that has the potential to fill this gap in Nigeria. Chinese aid, investments, and trade offer an alternative to Nigeria’s development aspirations in the face of U.S. aid retrenchment. Nigeria is positioned to benefit from China’s $50 billion pledge for Africa’s development. This study, using a post-development lens, examines the effects of US aid cuts on Nigeria’s socioeconomic development. It analyses the opportunities and risks of intensifying development cooperation with China as an alternative to U.S. aid. The study will use a qualitative method, combining desk research and Key Informant Interviews. Content analysis will be used to identify patterns, meanings, and themes from published articles and interview transcripts. Ethical considerations, including confidentiality, anonymity, and safety, will be observed. The study is expected to ascertain the actual cost of U.S. aid retrenchment to Nigeria. It will explain how Nigeria can ensure its agency and avoid dependency vis-à-vis the Chinese alternative.
Paper short abstract
This paper shows that the post-aid era delegates responsibility for development to African states without shifting real control over finance or policy. It finds that Southern cooperation reproduces structural constraints through elite authority and debt pressures.
Paper long abstract
The retreat of traditional Western aid is often framed as opening space for African states to pursue development autonomy with emerging Southern partners. This paper argues that post-aid restructuring through African South–South cooperation shifts responsibility for development outcomes onto African governments while preserving existing structures of authority, resource control, and policy influence. Emerging donor engagement can improve dialogue and investment but it often reinforces entrenched terms of engagement and limited accountability.
This paper demonstrates that contemporary cooperation arrangements prioritise investment, centralise authority, and maintain elite control by drawing on African regional integration frameworks, policy documents, financing agreements, and strategy texts. First, responsibility for infrastructure provision and development implementation falls to governments with constrained fiscal capacity and limited policy space. Second, cooperation strategies emphasise investment attraction and trade engagement, yet decision-making authority remains concentrated among political and economic elites. Third, mounting debt exposure creates pressures that limit autonomous policy action, as the rapid rise of new lenders and financiers complicates debt management and reinforces dependency.
The analysis reveals that development responsibility has been delegated to African states without corresponding shifts in power over capital or strategic direction. Transformative cooperation therefore requires institutional designs that entrench redistribution, accountable governance of development finance, and coordination around regional public goods that resist elite capture. This paper contributes to understanding how post-aid cooperation dynamics shape the tension between African agency and structural continuity.
Keywords: South–South cooperation, African development, post-aid development, development finance, structural power, elite capture, policy autonomy, debt dependency, regional integration
Paper short abstract
What mechanisms link UNFCCC presence to bilateral climate aid? Interviews with donor and recipient delegates reveal three: visibility, information, and relationship capital. Recipients emerge as strategic actors, but informal channels systematically disadvantage under-resourced delegations.
Paper long abstract
Quantitative research has established that diplomatic presence at UNFCCC negotiations predicts bilateral climate aid commitments. Yet the mechanisms driving this relationship remain unclear. How does being present at international climate negotiations translate into bilateral climate aid? This paper explores these mechanisms through semi-structured interviews with donor and recipient delegates who have participated in UNFCCC negotiations.
I interview officials from both donor and recipient country delegations, exploring three mechanisms through which recipients shape aid flows: visibility and signalling, where presence demonstrates commitment and capacity; information gathering, where delegates learn to navigate complex funding landscapes; and relationship capital, where repeated interactions build trust and familiarity. The interviews trace how recipients strategically allocate their time between formal negotiations and bilateral engagement to secure climate aid.
Preliminary findings suggest that UNFCCC venues function as "aid marketplaces" where recipients actively pursue bilateral opportunities alongside multilateral negotiations. The mechanisms appear complementary: visibility opens doors, information reduces transaction costs, and sustained relationships convert opportunities into commitments. Rather than passive beneficiaries, developing countries emerge as strategic actors navigating the informal architecture of climate cooperation.
These findings carry important implications for equitable partnerships in climate finance. If funding flows through informal channels that reward diplomatic capacity, countries lacking resources to maintain substantial delegations face systematic disadvantage. Understanding these mechanisms is essential for designing more inclusive cooperation frameworks, whether through delegation support, structured matchmaking, or alternative access channels, that genuinely support Southern voice and agency in climate finance.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how non-profit organisations are navigating recent aid cuts by reconfiguring operations, adopting new funding models, and engaging emerging donors.
Paper long abstract
Through advocacy, service delivery, and citizenship building, non-profits have long complemented the state’s role in achieving development outcomes across both the Global South and North. Yet, their heavy reliance on aid, philanthropy, and volunteerism makes them particularly vulnerable to global financial shocks. Recent aid retrenchment by traditional donors, including the United States and the United Kingdom, has disrupted the operations, workforce stability, and sustainability of many organisations. This study explores how non-profit organisations have responded to these shifts, focusing on the effects of aid cuts on operations, employee wellbeing, and management strategies. Drawing on documentary evidence, aid data, and key informant interviews in Ghana, the United Kingdom, and Canada, the study examines emerging coping mechanisms and alternative funding arrangements, including internally generated funds, and the philanthropic sector support from non-traditional donors. The findings contribute to debates on organisational resilience, sustainability, and South-North learning within the global non-profit sector.
Paper short abstract
Ghana’s STEM agenda is positioned as a post-aid strategy for national growth. However resource disparities influence access to STEM fields and subsequent employment opportunities. This paper calls for robust domestic institutions for fostering inclusive South–South cooperation.
Paper long abstract
This paper analyzes Ghana’s STEM-for-development agenda as a post-aid strategy to advance women’s economic inclusion, in the context of declining traditional donor support and evolving development cooperation frameworks. In response to calls for decoloniality, equitable partnership, and Southern agency, the study investigates how Ghana can strengthen domestic capabilities while strategically engaging new South–South and non-traditional partners to avoid adverse incorporation.
Drawing on qualitative data from girls-only, boys-only, and mixed Senior High Schools, as well as perspectives from teachers and education stakeholders, the findings demonstrate that national commitments to STEM expansion do not necessarily lead to inclusive labor-market outcomes. Instead, gendered school cultures, disparities in access to guidance and counselling, resource limitations, and inconsistent mentorship structures influence entry into STEM fields, the validation of aspirations, and persistence along the STEM-to-employment pathway. These institutional factors frequently perpetuate inequality, even when policy narratives emphasize empowerment and national competitiveness.
The paper contends that, in a post-aid context, the success of development cooperation, whether through South–South initiatives, regional integration, or blended financing, relies on reinforcing domestic institutions that shape opportunity and inclusion. The study concludes by recommending gender-responsive mechanisms that prioritize local ownership and accountability in STEM cooperation, such as professionalized career guidance systems, well-supported mentorship pipelines, targeted investments in educational environments, and regional strategies that link skills development to decent work. By connecting shifts in development cooperation to everyday institutional dynamics, this paper offers an empirically grounded, gender-sensitive perspective on how Global South countries can reconceptualize development beyond aid.
Paper short abstract
This paper reframes post-aid development outcomes through emergent governance, using Rwanda’s Saemaul Programme to show how poverty reduction emerges through relational practices and engagement with local knowledge, and to rethink partnerships around inclusivity and reciprocity.
Paper long abstract
In international development cooperation, outcomes such as poverty reduction, capacity building, and sustainability are often not the result of implementing pre-designed plans, but rather emerge through accumulated relational interactions across multiple actors and scales. Despite this, dominant development knowledge systems and donor-centred evaluation frameworks continue to reduce development outcomes to linear and visible results, marginalising the relational practices, informal coordination, and learning processes that shape development on the ground. Even approaches that emphasise “local voices” have tended to treat community experiences as evidence of participation, rather than as constitutive of agency and governance in the Global South.
Building on this critique, this study reinterprets development outcomes in the post-aid era through the concept of emergent governance. Drawing on field observations and in-depth interviews from three communities involved in Rwanda’s Saemaul programme, the analysis shows that Global South agency did not arise through formal policy ownership or donor-designed partnership arrangements. Instead, it emerged through situated responsiveness, improvisational adjustment, informal cooperation, relational repair, and sustained engagement with local knowledge. Such agency is embedded in a governance order constituted through repeated interactions among actors positioned across different scales, including community residents, local governments, overseas volunteers, and national research institutions.
In this sense, emergent governance offers a conceptual shift for theorising fair partnerships in the post-aid era—moving beyond institutional transplantation or one-directional transfer, and conceptualising cooperation as a relational mechanism grounded in inclusivity, reciprocity, and relational balance within specific local contexts.