Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-04-20
Source: The Conversation – in French– By Vincent Pradier Goeting, Doctor in management sciences, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
In 2025, official development assistance experienced its sharpest contraction ever recorded. But reducing the current situation to a matter of budget volumes would miss the essential point. What international cooperation is going through is above all a political and paradigmatic crisis – a multidimensional crisis that, revealingly, affects Western NGOs first and foremost today.
The figures published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)In April 2026 are of rare brutality. Official development assistance (ODA) from member countries of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) fell in 2025 by 23.1% in real terms, the sharpest annual contraction ever recorded since the indicator’s creation in 1969. Volumes have returned to their 2015 level, thus wiping out ten years of progress and, with them, part of the commitments made at the time of the adoption ofthe 2030 Agenda. According to the OECD itself, a new drop of nearly 6% is anticipated for 2026.
This historic drop is largely attributable to a single political decision:dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development(USAID), engaged as early as January 2025 by the second Trump administration. According to the OECD,US ODA was cut by more than half in one year (-56.9%), which constitutes the largest reduction ever recorded by a donor country. This American decision alone accounts for three-quarters of the global decrease in ODA in 2025. It has, in turn, accelerated the downward adjustments already initiated by other major donors – Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, and France. For the first time since 1995,These four countries simultaneously reduced their ODA for two consecutive years.
France is thus participating in this movement. After a reduction of 11% in 2023 and an additional cut of 13% in 2024, the French budget allocated to international solidarity has been subject, since the beginning of 2024, to five consecutive cuts. According to theestimations of Coordination SUD, the national platform of French NGOs, French ODA could be reduced by 58% in two years – and up to 64% for the budget lines of the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs that directly fund NGOs. The goal of reaching 0.7% of gross national income in 2025, set out in theAugust 2021 law, by default of being officially abandoned, seems to become a distant horizon.
A crisis that is not only financial
It would be tempting, faced with this data, to conclude a “funding crisis” in international cooperation. However, such analysis would be insufficient. What strikes one, as one observes the succession of cuts, is the regularity with which they are politically decided, and the weakness of the resistance they encounter in the public sphere — including when, as is the case in France,66% of the population declares support for international solidarity action.
This paradox – apopular support for the very principle of solidarity, but a growing rejection of the organizations that embody it – deserves to be taken seriously. It is partly due to themanagerializationand to thebureaucratizationprogressives of a distant sector, as it became professionalized, from the militant anchorage from which it historically drew its legitimacy. It especially opens the way for what Félicien Fauryappointeda form ofnegative politicization– the one that fuels populist rhetoric by portraying NGOs as technocratic, disconnected actors, or even accomplices of a system they were supposed to be the watchdogs of.
In other words, it is not the budgetary decision itself that is in question. It is itspolitical feasibility. For decades, ODA has simultaneously fulfilledthree functionsA: a humanitarian and development role undertaken; a geopolitical role, discreet but real; and a function of democratic legitimization for donor states, particularly in the Western space. These three functions are today particularlyput in difficulty. In a growing number of countries, international solidarity is no longer seen as a valuable political good – it has become, in certain segments of the public debate, an argumentagainstthe governments that practice it.
The crisis is therefore primarily that of aframework of legitimization. It primarily affects Western NGOs, whose organizational model ishistorically backed by this framework.
NGOs caught in triple contestation
French international solidarity NGOs, whose combined resourceshad experienceda growth of 43% between 2016 and 2020,see todaytheir economic models falter, especially in thehumanitarian sector. ODA routed through civil society organizations represented 27 billion dollars (more than 22.9 billion euros) globally in 2024, or 12.9% of bilateral ODA – a figure down by 2.3%. Restructurings are multiplying, thealso layoff plans.
But the budget contraction is only one aspect of the problem. NGOsWestern– as I had analyzed in aprevious article– are caught in a triple contestation that makes their repositioning particularly delicate.
In the South, first, where some statesclaim a renewed sovereigntyon aid flows and intervention methods. The ongoing reconfigurations in West Africa, notably in Mali and Burkina Faso, are the most visible illustration of this,but the dynamic is broader. It is accompanied by a word ofincreasingly structuredof local organizations that refuse to be merely subcontractors and carry an epistemic critique of the very categories with which development has been conceived.
In the North, then, through two opposing critics who,although not symmetrical, converging in their effects. On one side, a criticismpopulistwhich contests the very principle of an international solidarity financed by public funds. On the other hand, acritiquedecolonialwhich questions the power relations that perpetuate aid and the forms ofcolonialitythat it conveys. These two critiques, from opposite directions, together contribute to the erosion of the public legitimacy of NGOs. The first, more aggressive, manifests as a direct offensive against the very associative freedoms themselves: several international solidarity NGOs – from SOS Méditerranée to La Cimade, including France Terre d’Asile –were subject to obstacles, threats of withdrawal of subsidies or attempts to exclude from public contracts, in the name of an alleged breach ofpolitical neutrality.
Inside the organizations themselves, finally, where employees challenge an inequality that has become difficult to justify: the one that separates, within the same organization, staff recruited locally in thecountry officesfrom the Souths and their counterparts in Western headquarters – in terms of salaries, career prospects, but also recognition of knowledge and experience. Since the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and several public scandals, there has also been a voice raised by racialized staff within the Western headquarters themselves on organizational cultures and dominant representations. This has been documented notably by the reports of Peace Direct (“Time to decolonise aid”) and thework of the British International Development Committee, this internal double critique now constitutes one of the most structured — and the most difficult to absorb — challenges faced by thesector has been confronted.
What the private sector will not be able to do
In this context, part of the institutional discourse has taken refuge in a promise: that of the private sector asnew engine of development financing. Philanthropy,blended finance, impact obligations, public-private partnerships. The underlying idea is that a hybrid financial architecture could offset the gradual withdrawal of public funding.
One thing, however, must be said clearly: the private sector will not replace ODA in volume. This is not a political hypothesis, it is an arithmetical reality.
The 32 major philanthropic foundationswho report their data to the OECDmobilized 11.7 billion dollars in 2023, or about 5% of the total ODA from DAC countries. Funds mobilized by the private sectorviaMixed financing mechanisms, although growing, are mainly concentrated on areas where an economic model is viable—that is, not on contexts of extreme fragility nor on global public goods, which remain entirely dependent on public solidarity.
Above all, these instruments operate atransformation of grammaraid. They gradually replace a logic of return on investment with a logic of rights or general interest, steer priorities towards solvable contexts, and shift the center of gravity of the decision towards actors whose goals are not (always) those of solidarity.
Towards a deterioration or a rebuilding of the sector?
What are the prospects? Three trajectories, which can be combined, seem conceivable today for the aid system.
The first is that of adegraded continuityÂ: The current model persists, on life support, more fragmented and increasingly dependent on geopolitically oriented private funding. Western NGOs survive there, but at the cost of a gradual reduction in their transformative capacity. This is, in the short term, the most likely scenario.
The second is that of ageopolitical restructuringalready partially committed. Aid flows from non-DAC countries reporting their data to the OECD rose from $1.1 billion in 2000 to $17.7 billion in 2022 – a sixteen-fold increase over two decades. China has committed $4 billion (€3.4 billion) to its South-South Cooperation Fund since 2015. South-South cooperation does not replace Western ODA in volume, but it is gradually building an alternative architecture, based on different assumed norms – non-conditionality, reciprocity, non-interference – which directly compete with those of the Western model.
The third, more demanding, would be that of apluriversal refoundationA: the emergence of a new framework of legitimization, based on the recognition of situated knowledge, the co-construction of responses, and the questioning of historical power asymmetries. It requires, on the part of Western NGOs, the ability to break free from certain certainties—certainties that their own teams, especially in intervention areas, are already questioning. It also requires public actors capable of reinvesting in a political, and not only technical, conception of international solidarity.
It is only under this condition that one can speak, not of apost-ODA worldsuffered, but from a truly reorganized cooperation system. The question, fundamentally, is no longer whether the current model can be saved in its form. It is whether, collectively, the organizations ofinternational solidarity – in the broad sense – are capable of thinking about it and building another one.
Vincent Pradier Goeting does not work for, does not advise, does not hold shares, does not receive funds from an organization that could benefit from this article, and has declared no other affiliation than his research institution.
–ref. International cooperation in crisis? Behind the budget cuts, a crisis of legitimacy –https://theconversation.com/international-cooperation-in-crisis-behind-the-budget-cuts-a-crisis-of-legitimacy-280948