Beyond Development and Global Public Goods - Why International Cooperation Needs a New Concept in a Geoeconomic World

Recently, I found myself once again discussing the 2025 article in Foreign Policy Magazine “The End of Development”. It is a debate that has accompanied international cooperation for decades and that usually revolves around dependency, effectiveness, paternalism and donor fatigue.

What struck me during these discussions was something simple: I never felt comfortable with the concept of “development” in the first place and I never wanted to work in “aid.”

What drew me into this field was global health: antimicrobial resistance, pandemic preparedness, digital health, and the realization that these are fundamentally international challenges requiring international cooperation. Since much of this work happened through what we call development agencies, this is ultimately how I started working with GIZ and in international cooperation.

At first, I mostly understood international cooperation through the lens of global public goods. Climate change, pandemics, biodiversity loss, or antimicrobial resistance all require collective action across borders. But over the last years — especially through working on digital infrastructure, data governance, industrial ecosystems, and technology partnerships — it became clear to me that the dominant concept of international cooperation no longer matches geopolitical reality.

Of course, this starts with the concept of development itself. Concepts need to be useful. That is their purpose. I do not want to discuss whether the term “development” is morally good or bad. The question is whether it helps us understand the world and organize effective cooperation within it.

I do not think it does.

Of course, countries differ in terms of industrialization, institutional capacity, infrastructure, fiscal space, or technological capability. But the category of “developing countries” is analytically meaningless. China and Burundi are both formally considered developing countries in WTO terminology. Vietnam and Niger are grouped under the same conceptual umbrella. The category does not describe a coherent economic or political reality.

At the same time, the term creates a deeply hierarchical lens. Countries are implicitly defined by their distance from an assumed endpoint represented by “developed” countries. This shapes institutions, funding structures, partnerships, and mindsets. It encourages paternalism, policy transfer, benchmarking, and one-size-fits-all approaches instead of genuine strategic cooperation between actors with different but complementary capabilities.

This is perhaps why many institutions gradually shifted linguistically from “development cooperation” toward “international cooperation.” Germany’s GIZ is not the “German Society for Development.” It is the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit — the German Agency for International Cooperation.

But whereas we have not yet overcome the term “development”, our understanding of international cooperation is already outdated.

The dominant understanding of international cooperation that emerged after the Cold War was itself linked to a very specific historical moment: the age of neoliberal globalization. Cooperation became strongly associated with multilateralism and global public goods. Markets would drive efficiency. Globalization would create convergence. Industrial policy became unfashionable, while strategic economic thinking was often treated with suspicion.

That world no longer exists.

Today, geo-economics has returned to the center of international politics. Industrial policy is back. The United States alone committed nearly USD 370 billion through the Inflation Reduction Act to accelerate strategic industries linked to the green transition. The European Union adopted its Economic Security Strategy built around the three pillars “Protect, Promote, Partner.” Supply-chain resilience, semiconductor sovereignty, critical raw materials, and technological dependencies now shape political debates across the world.

And yet, much of the international cooperation sector still operates conceptually as if we were living in the neoliberal era.

This is particularly striking because other parts of governments already adapted intellectually to the geopolitical shift. Economic ministries, security actors, industrial policy experts, and geopolitical think tanks have spent years discussing de-risking, friend-shoring, strategic autonomy, and economic security. But the institutions supposedly specialized in international partnerships and international cooperation often still frame their work primarily through development and aid logic.

This is particularly the case for the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development that explicitly focused its new reform agenda on traditional “development topics” such as hunger and poverty.

This creates a major disconnect.

Because the return of geo-economics does not reduce the need for international cooperation. It dramatically increases it.

A world shaped by industrial policy, sanctions, subsidy races, export controls, and fragmented supply chains requires explicit partnerships much more than a hyper-globalized neoliberal world ever did. Under neoliberal globalization, the assumption was that markets and multilateral rules would organize economic integration automatically. Today, strategic industries, digital infrastructure, energy systems, pharmaceutical production, and critical supply chains require active political coordination and deliberate international partnerships.

And importantly, these partnerships are not only defensive. They are productive. The Inflation Reduction Act itself demonstrates this. Around 30% of battery-related subsidies reportedly benefited Korean and Japanese companies because industrial ecosystems are globally interconnected. In other words, industrial policy in a deeply interconnected economy already produces international spillover effects.

The same applies to technology development, critical minerals, semiconductor ecosystems, digital infrastructure, and pharmaceutical manufacturing. Purely national approaches become extremely expensive and often structurally inefficient in globally interconnected production systems.

This is why international cooperation now requires new approaches and a new practical understanding of what institutions and actors working in international cooperation should actually do.

Terms such as “development cooperation” no longer describe the governments and societies need from these institutions. We may instead establish concepts such as:

• geoeconomic cooperation,

• economic security partnerships,

• resilient supply-chain cooperation,

• technology development partnerships,

• or strategic capability partnerships.

 For those of you that follow my newsletter, I try to develop the concept of what I call “partnership-based industrial policy”. 

These concepts reflect a world where cooperation is no longer organized primarily around donor-recipient relationships or multilateralism, but around resilience, capability-building, diversification, technological sovereignty, and strategic alignment.

And this shift should not be understood as abandoning solidarity.

On the contrary. One reason many people still defend the development paradigm is because they fear losing the moral dimension of international cooperation. But solidarity does not require the concept of development. In fact, the emerging geopolitical environment may require a much more strategic understanding of solidarity.

Pandemic preparedness is a good example. Poorer countries often have weaker incentives and fewer resources to invest in preparedness capacities, even though outbreaks can rapidly become global threats. Supporting these capacities is therefore not charity nor development. It is strategic solidarity.

And beyond global public goods, solidarity is what creates alliances, trust, and long-term partnerships in a fragmented world where countries increasingly need reliable partners not only for economic security, but also for geopolitical and military security.

This is why I believe we should finally close the chapter on development.

Not because asymmetries between countries do not exist. Not because solidarity does not matter. And certainly not because international cooperation is becoming less important.

Quite the opposite.

International cooperation may become more important than ever. But the world no longer needs a conceptual framework built around the distinction between “developed” and “developing” countries.

What we need instead is a concept of international cooperation adapted to a geoeconomic world: one based on strategic solidarity, partnership, resilience, co-development, and mutual capability-building.

When I look at parts of the current debate around German development cooperation, I sometimes have the impression of an industry trying to defend an old business model instead of embracing a new reality. The idea that the future of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development should primarily be a return to a narrow focus on poverty and hunger sometimes feels comparable to the automobile industry trying to defend combustion engines or Kodak refusing to embrace digital photography.

The world has changed. And the answer to this change cannot simply be to defend the conceptual frameworks of the past more aggressively. The answer must be to constructively define what international cooperation should mean in a geoeconomic era.

For those of us working in international cooperation, this is not the end of relevance.

Personally, I feel very comfortable with the end of the development paradigm. I much prefer working on mutual-interest partnerships and high-end innovation projects to reproducing post-colonial donor-recipient relationships.

At the same time, we must also be honest about what this transformation requires from our institutions and from ourselves. Adapting to a geoeconomic world does not only require new narratives. It requires new competencies.

If international cooperation is increasingly about economic resilience and technological partnerships, then development agencies must engage much more deeply with institutions working on industrial policy.

And they must actively support their staff in building these competencies. The future international cooperation professional may need to understand semiconductor ecosystems as much as classical economics, digital public infrastructure as much as governance reform and supply-chain resilience as much as project management,

This is not a loss of purpose. It is a modernization of purpose.

For those of us working in international cooperation, this is not the end of relevance 

It is the beginning of a new mission.