DEVELOPMENT

5 A host of questions
for AFD
Foresighting for Development
Development agencies, steering through future worlds. Afd2025
I
During the exploration of these scenarios for the future, an overarching question often
appeared in the collective work: “What might the ingredients of a new post-SDG paradigm
be?” In addition to the many issues already encompassed by the Sustainable Development
Goals, other key and complementary issues seem to be somewhat ignored by the donor
community. But this does not mean that they will not be at the top of the agenda in ten
or fifteen years.
The combined effect of increasing demand and environmental degradation means that
access to natural resources already is and will remain one of the main challenges facing
humanity for the decades to come. Increasing tension over these resources – an issue
that can only be resolved in the long term – sparks severe short-term crises and even
national or regional conflict, and is an element running through all the scenarios. As a
result, crisis management, peace and stabilization and more generally the need for
increased resilience will likely dominate the development agenda in the medium and
long term.
Global public goods are not only a matter of climate change. In a hyper-connected world,
digital inclusion and access to the global network can also be seen as a new and important
global challenge requiring specific forms of regulation and needing to be treated as a
public good, or even a common good. Certainly, there is a noticeable shift in the debate
from the idea of global public goods (non-exclusive and non-rivalrous) towards the notion
of global commons (non-exclusive but now rivalrous as they are limited). This approach,
inspired by the work of 2009 Nobel Prize winner for Economics Elinor Ostrom, takes into
account the users of a resource, the rules for preserving or producing it and the institutions
best able to implement and enforce the rules.
On another front, the phenomenon of globalization continues to spread in all of the
four scenarios. Its forms differ of course depending on the context (fragmented or
non-territorial), but they take shape in a setting marked by high demographic pressure
with massive impacts on employment, inequality, environment and urban development.
This means that new forms of regulation to ensure sustainable and equitable globalization
will be crucial. They will apply to goods and services, capital and people. For example, we
need to imagine forms of global redistribution (or at least regional) and try to align the
contributions of an ever-expanding array of actors. Regulatory tools such as taxation –
local, national and global –, covering notably the informal sector could be more effectively
taken into account within the range of tools used by donors.
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