The western desire to cooperate about international development has fallen right off the social and political agenda. The UK reneged on its 0.7% of GNI commitment under Boris in 2021, after having moved our international development department called DFID into our foreign office to form the FCDO in 2020, effectively tying aid to the UKs foreign interests. The US has followed suit in a more extreme way, with Donald Trump almost entirely stopping aid.
For the ever shrinking group of us who think countries cooperating on international development is quite a good thing, it might be tempting to think these leaders are responding to the desires of a small proportion of their population. Make no mistake, these leaders are directly responding to the desires of most of their citizens. Survey after survey show that this type of cooperation is no longer a priority for citizens, and if anything it's an active detractor. YouGov polling shows that as of the 20th Jan 2025, 31% of Britons think the government is spending too much on welfare benefits, 25% argue it’s the environment and climate change, and 14% think it’s Defence spending. Public opinion on international aid outpaces them all. A full 64% of Britons think the government spends too much on overseas aid (I think the term international development cooperation is more fitting as we don't really have the right to meddle in other countries journeys through 'aid'), its highest level since the poll started in 2019 (YouGov, 2025).
These statistics are particularly surprising when you take into account how much this work actually costs the taxpayer. The figures in this space are never clear, but the table below represents the “Departmental Expenditure Limits” for different departments in 2023 (HM Treasury, 2024). I’ve included all the departments with a larger budget than the FCDO – The main vehicle for the UKs efforts to cooperate with other countries on international development. This figure has fallen since, and also includes operational costs and wider diplomatic costs. In 2024, Mark Lowcock, the former permanent secretary for DFID puts the UK’s real current overseas aid spending at about 0.3% of GDP, or something in the region of £7bn (Ross, 2024).
Departmental Group | Total DEL |
Health and Social Care | 181,693 |
Education | 81,793 |
Defence | 52,797 |
Scotland | 42,028 |
Transport | 28,912 |
Energy Security and Net Zero | 20,328 |
Wales | 18,071 |
Home Office | 17,911 |
Northern Ireland | 15,631 |
DLUHC – Local Government | 11,772 |
Justice | 10,677 |
DLUHC – Housing and Communities | 10,655 |
Science, Innovation and Technology | 10,620 |
Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office | 9,308 |
Whatever the nuance in the numbers means we actually spend, the reality is that we spend a lot more in other areas than we do on international development and the conversation about the value of cutting it gets more airtime than it deserves. However, it is still a large amount of money that could be used for other things. So why do I think it should be larger and that it should be something that we should be immensely proud of as a county, even if reducing spending on it could get me a faster GP appointment or a cheaper tube fare?
I want to fight international development co-operations corner by exploring two key ideas: 1) when done right, international development cooperation is effective and 2) none of us really want to live in a world where countries don't cooperate on international development
When done right, international development cooperation is effective:
International development cooperation has many aims. It aims to reduce poverty, improve health and education, promote economic growth, ensure gender equality, strengthen governance, enhance sustainability, build resilience to crises, respond to crises, and generally foster global cooperation for a more just and prosperous world.
Everyone would agree these are good things, but international development work is commonly criticized for being ineffective, prone to waste, linked to corruption, and distortionary with regards to local incentives in such a way that it becomes actively harmful. This argument has some historical merit, with books like “When helping hurts” demonstrating that the idea of charity sometimes does more damage than good. In addition, 'overseas aid' has often been neocolonial in its delivery, more to the benefit of the givers conscience or soft power than the receiver’s development. However, international development cooperation has improved in its effectiveness and scrutiny over time and has contributed towards significant improvements in global development.
Let’s take the UK as an example. Between, 1997 and 2020, the UK contributed to a genuine dent in some of the world’s most pressing problems. Our old Department for International Development (DFID) was really good, and the admiration of much of the world. Fighting against its closing, Andrew Mitchell MP said “it will destroy one of the most effective and respected engines of international development in the world” (Andrew Mitchell, 2020).
The number of people living in extreme poverty (less than $2.15 per day) fell from 29% in 1997 to 10% in 2018
It would be quite easy to reel off some stats about how the world has got better in those 20 years. For example, the number of people living in extreme poverty (less than $2.15 per day) fell from 29% in 1997 to 10% in 2018 (Roser, 2023). In addition, Mark Lowcock and Ranil Dissanayake (both senior figures in DFID) show in their book, “The Rise and Fall of the Department for International Development” (Lowcock & Dissanayake, 2024), that figures often improved more in DFID’s “priority countries” than they did elsewhere. However, I also want to highlight that one of the reasons DFID was so effective is that real scrutiny was provided to its programmes. By the very nature of the fact that international development is a contentious political issue, more scrutiny was applied to DFID than many other departments. In its first decade, independent parliamentary committees, multilateral organisations like the World Bank, and internal monitoring and evaluation tested the impact of it’s programmes. From 2011 onwards, “The Independent Commission for Aid Impact” was set up with the strapline: “The Independent Commission for Aid Impact scrutinises UK aid spending. We work to ensure UK aid is spent effectively, for those who need it most, and delivers value for UK taxpayers”. I randomly picked a report they had completed in 2014 scrutinizing DFIDs work on child mortality in Kenya which is summarized in the image below. It’s positive about DFIDs impact, but also shows the challenge provided (Foster, 2014).
More generally, economists are continually scrutinizing how international development works and how to make any programmes or efforts more effective. One of my favourite books is “Poor Economics”, written by two excellent economists Banerjee and Duflo in 2011. The books central premise is that the reason many anti-poverty programmes fail is because we have a poor understanding of how people who live in poverty behave. It answers questions like “Why do the poorest people in the Indian state of Maharashtra spend 7 percent of their food budget on sugar?” and “Why would a man in Morocco who doesn’t have enough to eat buy a television?” – It’s a great book (Banerjee & Duflo, 2011).
Many anti-poverty programmes fail is because we have a poor understanding of how people who live in poverty behave
This scrutiny from economists has led to more effective ways of supporting international development. One example of this is direct cash transfers, where money is given directly to people in poverty. These are either conditional, where the money has to be spent in a certain way, or unconditional, where the receiver can decide how to invest it. Technology advancements like mobile payment software on even the most basic phones have enabled this method of aid, and developments in AIs predictive capabilities that will enable cash to be given to people before major events like floods to help them prepare. Cash transfers have been shown to be an effective way to support people to escape poverty, and are more dignity focused than traditional paternalistic methods. The world bank has this to say about them:
“CCTs [conditional cash transfers] have been influential in redistributing income to the poor. They have had well-documented impacts on reducing current poverty, increasing school participation, reducing child labor, and improving utilization of health and nutrition services among mothers and children…. UCTs [unconditional cash transfers] are increasingly used in low-income settings where conditionalities can be harder to put in place. Recent studies have debunked the stereotypes about cash transfers causing dependency, increasing the consumption of temptation goods, or reducing labor-market participation. Small, frequent, and reliable cash payments to poor households have been shown to cause contemporaneous improvements in multiple domains, such as per capita consumption, savings, nutrition, mental health, teen pregnancies, child marriages, and intimate partner violence.” (Loeser et al., 2021)
Yes, there are examples of international development funding being used badly or contributing to corruption, but they are poor representations of the overall picture: Western resources can make an big difference in the world and economists are helping to ensure these resources are used more and more effectively over time.
None of us really want to live in a world where countries don't cooperate on international development:
As a country we clearly care about helping others. CAFs analysis of charitable giving in the UK shows that in 2023, citizens in the UK gave £13.9bn to charity, up £1.2bn on 2022s number despite financial pressure on households. A full ¾ of people supported charities, and some of the least affluent parts of the country are among the most generous, particularly in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (CAF, 2024). On a more personal level, everyone will have a friend or family member doing a fundraiser at any given moment.
In 2023, citizens in the UK gave £13.9bn to charity, up £1.2bn on 2022s number despite financial pressure on households
If this is true and international development cooperation is effective, why is funding for international development such a sticking point? Why do 64% of our fellow citizens think we are spending too much on it if it’s so important and we like ‘doing good’? Why does the CAF report show that despite giving going up to £13.9bn in 2023, £800m less went on overseas aid and disaster relief (CAF, 2024)?
I genuinely believe the answer to this question and how we approach international development going forwards is fundamentally important to who we are as people and a country. It is the national definition of being a good Samaritan, where we are the comparatively wealthy passer choosing whether to see and come alongside other nations. Alongside charitable giving and acts, it acts as a core pillar of the moral rule “do for others as you would have them do for you”.
I also genuinely believe that none of us really want to live in a world where countries don't cooperate on international development. I think the vast majority of people would feel compelled to participating in international development if they were confronted face to face with the type of extreme poverty that exists in parts of the world. We've seen this in decades gone by when there have been disasters around the world that have been connected with individual names and stories, and people in the west have been desperate to help. So why is funding for international development such a sticking point?
I think there's 2 dimensions that are helpful in thinking through that question and getting us back to a constructive conversation about international development. One is that we need to address the "scarcity mindset" we are approaching the conversation with, and the other is that we need to recognize the proximity driven psychological bias we have against international development.
Our scarcity mindset sounds something like the common argument “We have our own homeless people and veterans, why are we spending our charitable efforts on people who aren’t like us when there are people like us we could spend it on”. Put simply, we should support at home rather than worrying about international development. I don’t always love it as an argument as sometimes the people perpetuating it are not doing enough to help either group, but for those who bring it sincerely, I would strongly argue that supporting local and supporting international are not mutually exclusive. On a personal level, I have always subscribed to the view that we should support locally with our time and internationally with our money, because time goes further when you’re face-to-face with people and money goes further abroad than it does in the west. We should do both, not one or the other. On a societal level, the western world has accumulated more than enough resources over past centuries to provide for it’s own citizens and support global cooperation on international development. Our problems are not with general deprivation, our problems are with inequality. In 2021/22, 37% of total disposable household income in the UK went to the fifth of individuals with the highest household incomes, while 8% went to the fifth with the lowest (Francis-Devine, 2024). The top 1% of households have 230 times more wealth than those in the bottom 10% (FT, n.d.). We cannot let the oligarchic owners of newspapers and social media companies scapegoat international development (and refugees for that matter) whilst they grow richer and richer. They are hiding behind this false split of support at home versus support for international development so no one asks "Surely we could do both if we took some of your vast wealth?".
Our problems are not with general deprivation, our problems are with inequality. In 2021/22, 37% of total disposable household income in the UK went to the fifth of individuals with the highest household incomes, while 8% went to the fifth with the lowest (Francis-Devine, 2024). The top 1% of households have 230 times more wealth than those in the bottom 10% (FT, n.d.).
Rather than focusing on whether we should cut ties with the idea of international development in order to support people struggling at home, we should be focusing on cutting inequality at home and joining with other nations to fight against the evil that is extreme poverty around the world.
Our psychological bias against international development comes from the fact that humans find it much easier to empathize with problems that we are proximate to and can see. We all have “circles of empathy” which are dictated by our personal experience of pain, or pain we could imagine feeling, or the pain we have seen others experience. We want to help because we know that pain. This is demonstrated by CAFs graph on “how UK givers found out about the charities they give to” (CAF, 2024):
This proximity driven generosity is how we're hard-wired to respond to suffering, but it creates a psychological bias. Many of us have never looked in the eyes of someone in extreme poverty, who cannot vaccinate their children or send them to school, and therefore can’t comprehend their pain in the way that we can comprehend the pain of cancer or homelessness. By the very nature of the fact that the west holds a large proportion of the worlds resources, we don’t see some of the most pressing problems in the world like extreme poverty and therefore don’t know that pain. We just aren't proximate to it. Therefore, if we accept the status quo of empathetic generosity to those we can see at the expense of cooperating with others on international development, even if it feels like the right thing to do, we are inadvertently turning our backs on those who need it most.
Our scarcity mindset and psychological bias are both compounded by the fact that lots of people in the west are struggling. The level of pain we are seeing with our own eyes is increasing and it feels harder to think about things abroad. In the UK around 20% of people are in “absolute poverty” (where household income is below a the level needed to maintain basic living standards like food or housing), with 1.5% using foodbanks and 11% unable to heat their homes (Cuffe, 2024). These problems can’t and shouldn’t be ignored, and it is right that we try and fix problems at home. Citizens, the government, charities, and business need to work together to provide meaningful solutions to these problems (like Labour's planning reform, transition to green energy, and workers’ rights reforms, and braver solutions to fight inequality like wealth taxes and rejoining the EU). However, poverty here doesn't negate poverty elsewhere, and the need on an international scale is even more severe than the need we see in the UK and the west more generally. We need to battle the evil of poverty domestically, and we must not forget the plight of 700 million people living in extreme poverty (World Bank Group, 2024). It is a moral abomination that that scale of extreme poverty exists. We literally cannot imagine what it is like to live on that little money. I certainly can’t. It effectively means you have no choices - it very challenging to access food and clean water, and effectively impossible to access healthcare, education, or electricity, things that we take for granted in the west. If we saw this in our everyday lives, we would not accept it and feel compelled to do something. We must not ignore it nor become desensitized to it because we are not proximate to it.
In this post, I have made 2 points. Firstly, international development cooperation is an effective way to improve the lives of people suffering across the globe. Secondly, none of us really want a world without international development. We can operate without a scarcity mindset as we can help both domestically and internationally, with the challenges outside the west being even greater than the challenges in it. We must shift the domestic focus from slashing international development to battling inequality, and not led the smoke and mirrors of oligarchs distract us. In my mind these points lead me to the conclusion that we shouldn't struggle with the idea of international development cooperation, and we should support it's funding.
We must shift the domestic focus from slashing international development to battling inequality, and not led the smoke and mirrors of oligarchs distract us
However, more than just being something we should support there is a further reason why I personally think international development cooperation is something we must do. We don't exist in a vacuum in the world. We are contributing to current global harms like climate change far more than people in developing countries, and have contributed to historic harms like colonialism. Colonialism has left long legacies with regards to development, as I'm sure climate change will. It can be of zero doubt that part of the reason the west has developed faster than the rest of the world is due to how we exploited the rest of the world through colonialism and slavery. (Interestingly, there are lots of arguments about whether imperialism made economic sense for the imperialists, with some arguing that was not actually economically beneficial to most of the imperialists population due to it's high costs. They argue it was a "rent making scheme" where the benefits where gained by a small proportion of the population and the costs bore by the general taxpayer (This truth hidden behind the guise of nationalism I presume, much like modern "power making schemes" like Brexit) (Niemietz, 2024). Slavery seems more clear cut in how it economically benefited the west. Either way, there can be little doubt that both imperialism and slavery were devastating for the colonized and have had long lasting implications.) International development cooperation, particularly when given through things like direct cash transfers, represents a) reparations for these past harms as we try and redistribute the wealth that the west has built and the developing world has lost and b) reparations for current harms like climate change.
If we abide by the truth that we should “do for others as we would have them do for us” and we accept the need for reparations, we must continue to support the idea of and funding for international development.
YouGov (2025, January 20). What sector is the UK government spending too much on? YouGov.co.uk. Retrieved February 1, 2025, from https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/trackers/what-sector-is-the-uk-government-spending-too-much-on
Ross, M. (2024, October 29). Lessons from the rise and fall of the UK’s Department for International Development. Global Government Forum. Retrieved February 1, 2025, from https://www.globalgovernmentforum.com/lessons-from-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-uks-department-for-international-development/
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Andrew Mitchell MP (2020, July 9). FCO and DFID merger. Retrieved February 1, 2025, from https://www.andrew-mitchell-mp.co.uk/parliament/fco-and-dfid-merger
Roser, M. (2023, August 27). Extreme poverty: How far have we come, and how far do we still have to go? Retrieved February 1, 2025, from https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
Lowcock, M., & Dissanayake, R. (2024). The Rise and Fall of the Department for International Development. Center for Global Development.
Foster, M. (2014, March 14). DFID’s Contribution to the Reduction of Child Mortality in Kenya. Retrieved February 1, 2025, from https://icai.independent.gov.uk/review/dfids-contribution-reduction-child-mortality-kenya/review/
Banerjee, A., & Duflo, E. (2011). Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. PublicAffairs.
Loeser, J., Ozler, B., & Premand, P. (2021, May 10). What have we learned about cash transfers? Retrieved February 1, 2025, from https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/impactevaluations/what-have-we-learned-about-cash-transfers
Charities Aid Foundation (2024, March 1). UK Giving: Mapping generosity across the country. Retrieved February 1, 2025, from https://www.cafonline.org/insights/research/uk-giving-report
Francis-Devine, B. (2024, April 17). Income inequality in the UK. UK Parliament. Retrieved February 1, 2025, from https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7484/
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Cuffe, R. (2024, March 21). Absolute poverty: UK sees biggest rise for 30 years. BBC News. Retrieved February 1, 2025, from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68625344
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Niemietz , K. (2024, May 1). Imperial Measurement: A Cost–Benefit Analysis of Western Colonialism. Retrieved February 1, 2025, from https://iea.org.uk/publications/imperial-measurement-a-cost-benefit-analysis-of-western-colonialism/#The_Economics_of_Colonialism
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