I have been researching global development for more than 20 years-and I am really not optimistic right now

The beautiful thing about blogging is that it remains such an evolving, flexible and reflective genre for me.
Almost three weeks after my recent post on the impact of dismantling USAID-one of the most viewed posts in a very long time, I have thinking about a follow-up post.
And then I read Ken Opalo's post What will become of international development after the end of the aid paradigm? with great reflections and advice on what the current crisis means for careers in global development.
And then I read Kristof Titeca’s long-read Ali Kony and the twilight of the Lord’s Resistance Army on Joseph Kony’s son who deserted the infamous LRA.

And then I browsed through my archive and found a post I wrote almost exactly 13 years ago, in March 2012, 5 questions for a post-Kony 2012 debate. I wrote:

How can we channel the energy, ideas and good intentions of young people into sustainable change for communities at home and abroad?
Both the number of viewers of the Kony 2012 documentary and the quality and quantity of responses shows that there is an incredible new generation out there that wants to get involved in development issues and really tries hard to prepare themselves. They can also be mobilised quickly and are vocal. I personally believe that one of the reasons is that many of those young women and men feel that they can't influence policy-making or shaping their community at home and turn abroad to explore possibilities. This global energy is great, but we bloggers, academics or experienced aid and community workers need to do a better job to channel some of this energy into non-development activities at home to avoid the repetitions of turning good intentions into bad development projects. It may not be a 'brain drain', but at least there's the danger of an 'ideas drain'. Local communities need active, educated, critical, media-savvy citizens.

On the one hand, I think that the posts aged reasonably well-and on the other hand it is also a stark reminder of what will be lost when USAID gets dismantled or the Netherlands joining an ever-longer list of donors that are cutting back on aid money: It will affect how “we” will be connecting globally, envision a common future and shape our communities.

After years of talking about PPP, CSR, innovative finance, global public goods, philanthropy and philanthrocapitalism or localization it is amazing how many projects folded almost immediately the moment the USAID pipeline dried up.
Mutual aid and aspiring forms of solidarity are interesting, but they will have limited impact without traditional forms of global support. In a way I am not sure I agree entirely with Adama Coulibaly's striking visualization:

There is also a broader public discussion about what “development” means and what it should mean than I have seen in a long time-but I also wonder whether it reaches “minds” (through evidence) or “hearts” (through storytelling-another fancy word we like to use to describe advocacy). The violence of the ideological backlash is something I have not really seen in many years-or only in isolated, angry corners of the Daily Mail offices…

As if this was not bad enough, there is a perfect storm building up, namely another primarily ideological attack on higher education. And as much as we should have debates around decolonizing the discipline of development studies (colleagues have powerful debates over at the EADI blog for example on The Role of Critical Poetic Inquiry in Decolonising ‘Development), what is happening at the “motherland” of Western development studies in the UK or to the Swedish development research budget will have more negative impacts on the discussions about any “future of development”. Programs expanded in size, but also became more diverse, self-critical and “global”.  So what is next for education, training and learning?

Right now, we are talking about important, headline-grabbing “people will die” issues without USAID funding (the latest IHSA newsletter curates a wide range of examples), but what about the “softer” stuff-education, volunteering, media development or (academic) exchanges? What about global solidarity and intercultural communication in an age of weaponized migration discourses and rise of right-wing-populist parties in Europe and elsewhere, for example in the Nordic countries?

For every dollar a contractor pocketed as profit there were maybe ten cent that civil society needed to do work “at home”, teach about global connections, inequalities and more.
It's important to criticize the excesses-but also important to keep in mind that “the future” will probably look like British International Investment spending money on business class flights and very high salaries or US hedge funds taking over former USAID business. It will be the “financialization of everything” rather than “perhaps your NGO can do more with less”.

This is not (just) about “tomorrow’s leaders” that every university claims to educate, but about the capillary system of connection, solidarity and care that comes with many, many development projects, that cost little and take a long time to build and maintain.

Ken Opalo writes:

But will there be jobs?
The simple answer is that there won’t be as many jobs as before. However, there’s a distinct opportunity for those that can build careers not anchored in aid dependency. As noted above, the coming changes in how donors and most aid organizations conduct their affairs are unavoidable. The same goes for opinions against aid dependency in low-income countries. The new job market will likely reward those who invest in understanding the geopolitics of aid, are interested in fostering commercial and security relations between historical donors and low-income countries, and those willing to work in/with the private sector in low-income countries. For obvious reasons, there will be very few jobs that fall in the category of haphazard social or political engineering.

Vidushi Yadav

But I was also reminded about something Michael Woolcock wrote in his brilliant recent book on international development:

We live in a deeply interdependent world, in which few of us now have any direct connection to securing the basic essentials of life. Unlike any of the preceeding 2,500 generations of humans, most of us don't grow our own food, collect our own water, dispose of our own waste, make our own clothes, build our own houses supply our own energy, or protect our own communities. Others do these things for us; in exchange, we offer up our particular skills and resources, and we exchange (trade) with one another. Doing this more fairly and equitably, at scale, is the wonder of development. Whether seeking a full-time career in the development business, committing one's spare time to causes of concern, or just seeking to be more informed about global affairs, it is the recognition of our deep interdependence, and our gratitude to those around us and those who went before us, that should inspire us to give back, to offer up, to pay forward (pp.137-138).

The different pillars that Michael outlines are all under threat, perhaps not everything everywhere all at once, but it's getting close...it is hard to keep some optimism and many things may not work out-all for a short moment where fossil men burned it all down and laughed at the fire...