Climate change, migration flows, security - growing challenges like these are calling for new responses from EU development policy. Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 will in itself require additional financial resources of up to USD 2.5 trillion every year in middle- and...

Investments in climate change mitigation will have to rise massively in the coming years in order to keep the global temperature increase below 1.5°C. Rising levels of investment in mitigation can reduce the impacts of climate change. Yet, they also increase the risk that these investments...

To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, developing countries need additional funding. Funding can come from four sources: domestic public resources (or revenues), international public resources, domestic private resources or international private resources. Of these four...

Multilateral cooperation means that states can collectively achieve more than they can through individual and bilateral efforts alone. Multilateral organisations are important instruments for this: they have a greater geographic and thematic reach, operate at a larger scale and stand for...

As China deepens its engagement in global governance and development, its strategic motivation and rising influence within the UN and on international rules and norms are attracting the world's attention. This paper focuses on China’s engagement with the UNDS, specifically Chinese funding and...

Earmarking financial contributions for specific geographic, thematic or other priorities has emerged as an important modality for funding multilateral development organisations. Earmarking has had positive consequences, such as the mobilisation of resources for multilateral organisations and new...

Since 2016, Germany has been the second largest contributor to the United Nations development system (UNDS) for development-related and humanitarian activities, after the United States of America. The biggest increase in Germany’s funding has been in the form of earmarked contributions, that...

There is a widely held consensus that it will not be possible to feed the world without the help of the smallholders of Africa, Latin America and Asia, who number up to 570 million farms or 2 billion people. Given the sheer size of this figure alone, the sustainable development of smallholder...