European Union (EU) funding for United Nations (UN) organisations has expanded significantly over the last two decades. The EU’s partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is an important example of EU-UN cooperation, and UNDP was the fourth-largest UN recipient of...

The present collection of short papers is an experimental, explorative and introspective German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) project on international and transnational cooperation for development and sustainability. It is the product of internal brainstorming discussions at...

This paper offers a comparative analysis of Brazilian and Chinese partnerships with the United Nations (UN) as a mechanism and channel for policy transfer. In international policy travel flows, China and Brazil currently hold privileged places as hubs from which development-related policies...

This Discussion Paper makes the case for universality in United Nations (UN) development work. So far, the UN development pillar has largely remained wedded to a 20th-century approach to development cooperation that centres on two groups of states and a one-way relationship between them: rich...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing vaccination process calls for decisive, internationally coordinated and forward-looking action. We propose short-, medium- and long-term actions and emphasise that the political pressure for action should not only focus on short-term management, but on...

Aid fragmentation is widely denounced, though recent studies suggest potential benefits. To reconcile these mixed findings, we make a case for studying differences across aid sectors and levels of analysis. Our cross-national time-series analysis of data from 141 countries suggests aid...

This paper analyses the European Union’s (EU) evolving motivations, priorities and current approaches to development cooperation under the label of “Team Europe”, following its introduction in April 2020 as the European Union’s global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It assesses what...

Over the last two decades, national development agencies have committed to results-based approaches and to putting evidence at the centre of their decision-making. For evidence “optimists”, this is a much-needed corrective to past practice; in contrast, “pessimists” worry about ideology...

The concept and mainstream approaches of development cooperation (DC) have been criticised since the early beginning of their existence. Post-development (PD) scholars have been criticising international DC since 1990 for both its Western perspective and the lack of reflection on asymmetrical...

Having already been growing in importance for a number of years, geopolitics as it relates to the Global South has become tremendously more relevant following Russia’s aggression in Ukraine in 2022. Rivalries with China are set to become even more influential in future, determining...