DEVELOPMENT

5 A host of questions for AFD
Foresighting for Development
Development agencies, steering through future worlds. Afd2025
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Finally, the SDG agenda will most likely be a game changer due to its universal scope
and at the same time render the notion of development assistance more vague, or even
obsolete. By 2025, will the OECD-DAC list of recipients still make sense? Even if it continues
to exist, its composition will evolve, and as will possibly the way it is used. Will the donors’
choice of intervention zones in line with the list still make sense? When countries graduate
from the DAC list, they may request regulatory harmonization or the implementation of
special public policies (e.g., Turkey’s EU accession process). For middle-income countries,
the obstacles to accessing long-term financing will certainly be felt at a time when they
may need it most and when their development choices can strongly impact the rest of
the international community.
The richest countries will be open to taking up ideas and innovations – also from other
regions in the world – that enable them to capitalize on their expertise and to successfully
see through socio-economic transitions, for which there are no set or universal recipes.
In a world of competing models (i.e. “Babel 3.0”) or in the world of “Aligning Aspirations”,
achieving sustainable development may mean supporting such an approach.
“The universal nature of the SDGs will result in the explosion of the North/South
mandate” A French senior civil servant.
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The amplitude that each of these themes could take within the donors’ activities, and the
way in which the donors could address them (objectives, organization, tools, resources)
of course depends on many other factors to be discussed in the following section.
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