Over the last ten years, the landscape of development cooperation has changed dramatically. As traditional ODA programming becomes just one of many levers for development – alongside trade, investment, and diplomacy –understanding ‘what works’ remains critical in addressing global development challenges. As evaluators, we must adapt our approaches and methods so they keep pace with, and help to shape, this changing landscape.
This week, the UK government hosted a ‘Global Partnerships Conference to build new international coalitions to tackle shared challenges’ – a collaboration between the FCDO, the South African government, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and British International Investment.
The conference’s aims were lofty, with its sights set on building ‘new coalitions to respond to shared challenges, unlock investment, support country-led resilient growth, and build alliances for international cooperation – making the UK and our partners safer, more resilient and prosperous’. It’s an ambitious, but not wholly new approach.
In our blog ‘The Road Beyond Seville’, we noted that a key theme emerging from the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4) was that ‘the ODA-Centric Era Is Over’. This long-predicted shift ‘beyond aid’ towards more equitable partnerships is the culmination of a number of trends: sweeping reductions in ODA budgets across Europe and the US; increased emphasis in donors’ countries on mutual benefit (‘trade over aid’); and at least a rhetorical focus on localisation (even if practice remains ambiguous).
The conference’s themes – digital innovation; sustainable finance and fiscal resilience; and shifting power through equitable partnerships – echo these trends, with ‘digital innovation’ likely to address the dramatic impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) (for better or worse) on developing countries.
But what does this mean for evaluators already working to enhance international cooperation and tackle shared challenges? As aid budgets decline, there are worrying signs that evaluation and learning are slipping down the priority list. However, evaluation and learning are all the more important as we move from traditional aid programmes to an ‘all the levers’ approach to development cooperation.
Agulhas has developed approaches, methods and tools for evaluating these new development partnerships. We recently undertook an evaluation of the British High Commission in Tanzania’s work on sustainable growth and investment partnerships, looking at the shift to partnerships on trade and investment and the deployment of the full range of levers available to the UK. These include traditional development funding, commercial and trading relationships, policy and diplomatic engagement, and UK loan and financing facilities and expertise. The evaluation was strongly learning focused, designed to reflect on ‘what works’ within a rapidly evolving context. Using an outcome harvesting methodology, the evaluation identified and validated UK contributions to five strategic outcomes – strategic planning, tax reform, infrastructure, investment promotion and financial leverage. We also produced a guidance note on how to evaluate partnerships and ‘whole of government’ approaches, covering a range of levers.
In a similar departure from traditional evaluations, the UK’s aid watchdog, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI), is currently undertaking a review of the UK’s ‘development partnerships’, tracking the government’s shift in approach ‘from donor to investor’. Given the FCDO’s pledge that spending less on aid does not mean leaving behind the UK’s values and responsibilities, independent scrutiny of this major shift in the modalities of UK development cooperation remains extremely important. ICAI’s latest report; ‘The changing global context for development cooperation’, tracks how the rapid fall in global ODA flows is compounding the challenges facing developing countries.
It’s not just governments that will need to reset their approaches and use all the tools at their disposal to do so. Multilateral organisations are also facing major shifts in their funding landscape, forcing them to rethink their global footprint and operational models.
A 2025 review of 31 multilateral organisations, carried out by Agulhas for MOPAN, found that most were facing budget reductions of between 11% and 30%, forcing them to make hard choices about how to approach their mandates (‘doing less with less’). A new MOPAN assessment of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), launching this month, will explore how OCHA has stewarded the UN humanitarian system through a period of ‘hyper-prioritisation’, with global humanitarian aid falling by more than 50% since 2022. The 2026 MOPAN study on Comparative Advantage in the Multilateral Health Ecosystem, supported by Agulhas, is intended to inform future decisions on mandate rationalisation, as the global health ecosystem faces similar challenges with shortfalls across major organisations and funds.
Over the last ten years, the landscape of development cooperation has changed dramatically. As traditional ODA programming becomes just one of many levers for development – alongside trade, investment, and diplomacy –understanding ‘what works’ remains critical in addressing global development challenges. As evaluators, we must adapt our approaches and methods so they keep pace with, and help to shape, this changing landscape.
