Episode 220: The Changing Landscape of Global Aid with Dr. Duncan Green

This week on The International Risk Podcast, Dominic Bowen sits down with Dr. Duncan Green, a leading expert on global development and social change, to discuss the evolving landscape of foreign aid and the challenges that lie ahead. As major donor countries reassess their commitments and priorities shift toward  national interest, and military spending, the global aid system faces unprecedented disruption. In this episode, Duncan breaks down the implications of aid cuts, the rise of alternative funding models, and how grassroots movements might step up as formal aid structures decline.

Duncan is a Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he co-directs the Activism, Influencing and Change Programme. He also leads the Influencing Programme at the Global Executive Leadership Initiative and acts as a consultant for community engagement programs. Formerly Head of Research and Strategic Adviser at Oxfam GB, Duncan is known for his influential "From Poverty to Power" blog and his work fostering leadership and innovation in global development.

Visit the new LSE Activism, Influence, and Change Blog.

The International Risk Podcast is a must-listen for senior executives, board members, and risk advisors. This weekly podcast dives deep into international relations, emerging risks, and strategic opportunities. Hosted by Dominic Bowen, Head of Strategic Advisory at one of Europe's top risk consulting firms, the podcast brings together global experts to share insights and actionable strategies.

Dominic's 20+ years of experience managing complex operations in high-risk environments, combined with his role as a public speaker and university lecturer, make him uniquely positioned to guide these conversations. From conflict zones to corporate boardrooms, he explores the risks shaping our world and how organisations can navigate them.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction: Setting the Stage for the Global Aid Debate
• 1:20 The Scale of Foreign Aid: Why It Matters
• 2:35 A New Architecture of Aid: Short and Long-Term Outlook
• 7:01 Regional Disparities in Aid Reductions
• 8:01 Localization in Aid: Opportunity or Challenge?
• 11:00 A Crisis of Innovation: Is the Aid Sector Crisis Self-Inflicted?
• 13:14 The Limits of Soft Power: A Diminishing Tool?
• 15:18 China’s Role: Filling the Gap Left by Western Aid
• 17:46 Shifting Power Dynamics: A New Balance of Global Influence
• 19:32 Military Spending vs. Aid: Changing National Priorities
• 21:00 Human Impact: The Real Cost of Aid Reduction
• 22:38 Emerging Alternatives: Aid from Diaspora and Faith-Based Networks
• 26:06 Activism, Influence and Change Network at LSE
• 29:01 The Future of Grassroots Movements in a Post-Aid World
• 31:40 What International Risks Concern You the Most?
• 33:05 Outro and Acknowledgements

Transcript

00:02.22
Speaker
Welcome back to the International Risk Podcast, where we discuss the latest world news and significant events that impact businesses and organizations worldwide. Hi, I'm Dominic and today on the International Risk Podcast, we're speaking with one of the leading voices in international development, Dr. Duncan Green. He's a professor in practice and he's the director of the Activism, Influence and Change program at the London School of Economics.

00:26.20
Speaker
Dr. Green has spent decades analyzing how power, politics and policy shape change. He's the author of How Change Happens and From Poverty to Power. And his daily blog is essential reading for anyone working in international development. In today's episode, we're gonna tackle the critical and uncomfortable truth that global aid may be collapsing. With the US dismantling USAID under Donald Trump, the UK slashing its aid budget, and European governments pulling back, we're really witnessing a fundamental shift in aid and development.

00:54.71
Speaker
We'll unpack what this means for the millions of people who depend on foreign aid, how power vacuums may be filled by other countries, and what the future holds for NGOs, UN agencies, and the development sector. So if you're into policy, risk, business, or what's happening around the world, this episode is relevant for you.

01:10.54
Speaker
Dr. Green, welcome to the International Risk Podcast. Thanks very much, Tomlick. Great to be here. Duncan, in 2024, the global humanitarian aid sector, you know, has been facing challenges like it does every year with increasing needs and decreasing funding. But if we look back at the 2024 period, I think the the global humanitarian community was requiring about 48 billion dollars.

01:32.85

billion dollars in order to assist nearly 190 million people over 71 countries. But this is just part of the picture. This is just the humanitarian sector. If we look broadly at all the development needs, how big is foreign aid and and why does it matter?

01:47.62
Speaker
Yeah, humanitarian is the one that has all the profile because it's you know so televisual, it's so urgent. It's what politicians talk about. But actually, long-term development, those sort of the the sort of the the infrastructure, the health, the education, is about $4 for every $1 of humanitarian.

02:05.45
Speaker
So the total is about $200 billion. And that's $200 billion in official aid. That's not $200 billion in people trying to help each other. What always strikes me is how we just talk about aid all the time.

02:16.33
Speaker
And there's this huge world of altruistic giving around it, which is from churches, from churches, from Muslims, from tithing, from yeah anything. it that it absolutely dwarfs the volume of aid.

02:28.87
Speaker
And that's going to become more important in the future, because I think you're right from the intro, the aid system is facing collapse. With the USAID being completely dismantled under the Trump administration, how do you see the global development landscape changing in the short term? And then I guess my next question will be, how do you see it changing in the long term? But just even for the short term effects, I mean, I think of the high hundreds of thousands of people I've seen supported in places like Sudan and and Yemen and and Syria. You know, these people are simply not getting the food aid. They're not getting the medical assistance that they were yesterday.

02:59.26
Speaker
What is the impact? So let's unpack this a little bit. so So I think, first let's think about aid as a system, okay? It's a big $200 billion dollars global system with its architecture, which has grown up over the years and evolved and so on. And I was talking i talked to a lot of people in the UN and the international NGOs, and I was on a webinar recently, and one of them one of the UN guys said, well, look, we're trying to work out if what's happening now is a tsunami, which destroys everything,

03:24.85
Speaker
a change in the in the sort of ar ocean current, which means you're now permanently swimming against the tech current rather than with it, or a tide which will come and then go. Yeah, a bit like a pendulum. And so you just have to dig in and things will get all right. Things will come back to how they were. And looking around, I think we're in a tsunami.

03:42.58
Speaker
So I think what this is, it's not going to leave a lot standing. And what you'll get after after this is a new architecture emerging, which we can't foresee. And the reason I say that is partly because of the size, importance of USAID. But then what really struck me was just how quickly loads of other donors jumped on board.

04:00.04
Speaker
It was obvious, you know, the way the UK, Switzerland, Germany, France, Japan, everybody jumped on board and said, oh, great, now we can do this and spend the money on defense or spend the money on something else.

04:10.55
Speaker
It was obvious that the aid system had been kind of hollowed out before the USAID decision and was now collapsing all around us. And A big part of the aid system since the end of World War II, since it was really founded, has been a global set of institutions largely based in the US.

04:28.10
Speaker
That is now looking as though it may ah come to an end. The World Bank, we're told, is looking for to move its headquarters outside the US. But also the multilateral system is looking very, very fragile. So I think we're likely to see in the long term a new architecture, and it's very hard to predict, and I'm not even sure it's worth trying to predict.

04:45.52
Speaker
In the short term, you are short term and long term. Short term, obviously, wave after wave of redundancies, closures, the programs cutting, being cut, the Life-saving medicine stuck in warehouses going going off when people are actually in desperate need.

05:01.24
Speaker
And then in in terms of the organizations, you're going to see a bunch of mergers between organizations as they desperately try and stay afloat. You pity anyone who's a consultant in the aid business because you're about to be completely swamped by flood of consultants as people lose their jobs in the in the organizations.

05:16.95
Speaker
and But also sort of just a huge blow to morale. We thought we were on the side of the angels. We were doing good things. We figured if anybody came for us, there would be a kind of enormous uproar and people would stand up for us. That isn't hasn't happened. There is silence really about the the the destruction of the aid sector beyond people who work in the aid sector. So I think that's been quite a blow to morale as well, to self-image.

05:43.35
Speaker
Getting into the weeds a bit, you can start differentiating, right? So some organizations are more dependent on donor aid than others. So if you look, say, at the faith-based organizations that raise money in churches or in mosques, they're not going to be so dependent.

05:57.47
Speaker
yeah Also, America took a decision years ago not to take money from from the American government for sort of political and autonomy reasons, so they're not going to be so affected. are The big foundations like Gates and Huwlett and all the others, they still got their endowments.

06:11.69
Speaker
um and If they're in tech, They have been doing all right. So they'll still be big players, bigger than they were before. And member-based organizations are going to be, you know, so there are bits of the aid sector which will be resilient and will be part of this new architecture. There are also, within the existing age aid system, I think there are parts of it which are likely to be more resilient.

06:32.17
Speaker
I think the food, you know, the food aid sector is likely to stick around, not least because there's a big American farm lobby which wants the Americans to buy its food and ship it overseas. And I think humanitarian will emerge in some form just because people need to be helped when something terrible happens.

06:48.10
Speaker
I personally think that this whole field, which has been emerging in recent years of influencing, trying to influence the wider sector rather than just run a tidy, effective program, that is likely to become more important if there's less money to actually deliver services directly.

07:02.56
Speaker
So some things I think are going to get relatively more important. And what about geographically? You talked and and your colleague talked about a potential tsunami or a very likely tsunami. Do you think there's some regions that are going to feel the pain faster than others?

07:17.08
Speaker
What parts of the world should we be most concerned about? mean, what we were having even before all this was a regionalization where you have an increasing role of regional powers. Like if you're in East Africa, it's Turkey and the Gulf, right? That many in many cases more important.

07:32.04
Speaker
but the Americans or the Europeans. If you're in East Asia, China. so So you've you've got a regionalization of these relationships already. That will be turbocharged by what's going on. And then, you the problem is if you're in a region which doesn't have a new regional power to step in, like a large part, I think, of sub-Saharan Africa, maybe Latin America, they're going to be very badly hit because there isn't a replacement.

07:54.88
Speaker
So you're going to have a new regional architecture with big gaps. And I think that's what what's causing a lot of concern at the moment. And if we have a look at some of the UN agencies, ah certainly anyone working in humanitarian or or long-term development programs is very familiar with organisations like and the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, UNDP, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

08:16.38
Speaker
And these ah these are big organisations that are generally very well funded and and generally their staff are very well paid. And there's always been a discussion. There's been for decades discussions about Countries funding UN agencies who then fund international NGOs who eventually then pass on a little bit of that funding to local organisations. Do you see this as a potential positive reset of that dynamic? I mean, organisations like UNICEF and UNHCR must be struggling ah with the with the withdrawal of for money from DFID or from the UK government from the US government.

08:48.66
Speaker
Yeah, there's a bit of straw clutchism going on where um there know people say, oh, silver lining, this is going to lead to localization. This is going do all these things we've wanted and haven't happened because the vested interests are just too powerful.

09:00.08
Speaker
And then they've kind of resisted while paying lip service to these good ideas. I'm a bit skeptical. I think that things will happen, but they may not look like what people were hoping for. Let's say localization, which has been a massive feature of the discussion over the last 10, 15 years, where what you're yeah what you're saying that, you know,

09:18.11
Speaker
The people who best understand the context are local people. The people who need the money are local organizations. The people who can respond quickly in an emergency are local organizations. And yet they are at the bottom of the food chain, waiting for money to trickle down through this big international architecture. That international architecture, if the tsunami metaphor is right, is being either massively reduced or swept away altogether.

09:39.89
Speaker
So some form of localization will happen, but it's not going to have the funding that the current aid system does. It's going to rely far more on grassroots organisations, voluntary mobilisation, national and local governments. It's going to be a very different beast. But I think that will be one of the sort of, if not silver, slightly brighter linings of the cloud.

09:59.74
Speaker
Yeah, there was a huge, basically inertial force in the aid system, which just was getting in the way of this kind of thing. And that is going to be greatly weakened. Within those organizations you mentioned, the ones that are working on global goods like WHO, you can't replace a global epidemic you know facility with a bunch of small organizations working in the grassroots. So there'll be pieces of that architecture which either have to remain, or if they're not if they don't remain,

10:26.24
Speaker
we will all be really, really the worse off. So there are some big global public goods issues around that and climate change and coordination and things like that. Some of the big service delivery organisations, maybe those things can go can go local or regional more easily.

10:40.91
Speaker
So it's it's again, you've got to get a bit nuanced. And then when yeah for anybody out there who's contemplating a job in this sector, still after the last couple of months, follow money. Go and see how these organizations are funded. How dependent are they on donors, especially northern donors? Make your decisions accordingly, I would say.

10:59.91
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's always been always been good advice, Duncan. I think more than once I've walked into ah into a program thinking I was there as ah as a long-term country director or long-term team leader to find out there's only three months of funding left. But alas, ah that has been the aid sector for for a long time.

11:16.65
Speaker
And I wonder, i mean, there's certainly, i've I've heard conversations and I've heard people analyse that the the current crisis is potentially self-inflicted by the sector because of a a lack of innovation. And whilst there certainly has been some innovation, perhaps not the same level and the speed and that we might see in the corporate sector.

11:33.15
Speaker
How fair do you think that is, that it is self-inflicted because of um the failure to localise, the the failure to really prove impact? Well, I don't think if it had localised, there would have been any difference in the decision on USAID. Sorry. I mean, USAID has been pushing for localisation and has, in fact, done rather better than a lot of other donors.

11:50.36
Speaker
in terms of the amount of money that's going through localization. was big push by Samantha Power, and she was head of USID. So I don't think this is anything anything different would have happened. So not true.

12:01.49
Speaker
But I think the fragility of the aid sector, i I was talking to a friend of mine recently, who's a sort systems thinker. And we were talking about this idea in systems thinking that forests go through a thing called the forest cycle, where they start off with full of different plants and diversity, and then a few species take over and and basically dominate, and the forest becomes very brittle in the sense of a new disease or some new shock can destroy the whole forest.

12:25.69
Speaker
And that kind of feels like an apt metaphor for what's gone on, that the aid sector became quite rigid, became quite dependent on a few sources of money, and had a certain way of working, very global,

12:37.80
Speaker
very big, and that made it very vulnerable to this shock. So I think, you know, there have always been scrappy insurgencies around the edges, you know, the social enterprise people, the microfinance people, bits of the private sector foundations.

12:50.22
Speaker
They've all been working away trying to claim a space in in this world and they've always struggled to make a dent on this big aid sort edifice, that edifice is now shrinking rapidly. So things will expand into that gap.

13:06.52
Speaker
But I think a lot of people are going to get hurt because of the chaotic and just cruel nature of the way that's happening. And we know that development has ah long been a tool for soft power. And I think it was actually yeah Kennedy, JFK, that actually created USAID, if memory serves me correct.

13:22.20
Speaker
But we know that many countries use aid. The Australian government was using aid as a as a tool back in the 2010s in order to get ah a seat on the Security Council. So this is not a new concept of using aid and and development as ah as a soft tool to achieve ah geopolitical leverage. is this ah Is this a recognition that perhaps there's a better way or a more effective way for governments? And if we look at the Trump administration putting America first, is this a recognition that there is a better, more efficient way to achieve a country's objectives as opposed to doing it through foreign aid?

13:54.66
Speaker
feels to me that they've basically not bought the soft power argument. Yeah, the Trump administration has just closed Voice of America, which we always used to rail against back in the day for being, you know, an imperialist voice of the US administration.

14:07.06
Speaker
And now suddenly we're saying, oh, no, don't close the Voice of America. But so I think that they're just saying, man, don't buy any of that soft aid rubbish, ah soft power rubbish. ah We're just going to. bully people into doing what we want.

14:19.00
Speaker
So it's hard power or nothing. It's quite a big challenge because, i mean, i I was never terribly comfortable with the soft aid argument, but I think it's true that, you know, organizations like in in Britain, the BBC World Service, or the British Council, or the Peace Corps, or, you and then the Australian equivalent, I mean, all of these enabled you to have a conversation with future leaders, with pux They did good things of their own accord in terms of getting information to people who had no reliable source of information. All that's going.

14:47.12
Speaker
So now people are going to be at the mercy of social media. There isn't going to be an independent voice. there is ah there is a height It's a hard power world. yeah If you think the aid's gone, I mean, the soft power is really gone. um So that's going to really change into us more some more brutal kind of set of relationships, I think.

15:03.26
Speaker
Going back to some sort 19th century might is right. bit where ah big powers just decide whether who gets Greenland and who gets Ukraine. And um that's yeah that's ah that's an extraordinary reversal of 200 years of history.

15:17.16
Speaker
So Duncan, something that people are starting to get concerned about is whether the West is going to lose influence and and whether China and Russia are going to step into the aid vacuum and whether this is something we should be worried about. I understand that China has ramped up its global foreign aid from about half a billion to about three billion um over the last couple of years. But of course, this was all before the big withdrawal from the US and the UK. Is this something that you think we need to be monitoring? And if so, what are the risks that we should be looking at?

15:45.90
Speaker
I think that might be a bit old paradigm. The rising powers are definitely filling the space that's left by the retreat of America and Europe as global powers. That was happening before all this. It was just a product of the shift of ah of the sort of centre of economic gravity in the world.

16:01.92
Speaker
But they're not doing it by using the same tools. you know Aid is such a colonial construct. It's such a Western construct. you know We try and fit what China does in terms of its relationship with other countries into the aid box.

16:15.18
Speaker
But it's very hard to do that. Half of it's like there's a big mix of grants and concessional loans and all sorts of things, investment going on. And the aid framing is really not that useful.

16:26.52
Speaker
So think, yes, you're seeing, as you were seeing before, a a multilateralisation, a multipolarisation of the world in terms of politics and economics.

16:37.18
Speaker
And this is just the latest trend. ratchet up of this. It's quite a significant bit of ratcheting, but it's building on something that was going on anyway. You know, i was in Papua. I do some work in Papua New Guinea. And it's really interesting there because from the Australian point of view, it's there big, you know, near abroad, 60 miles off the Australian coast. They pump a lot of money in there. And they're really concerned about the rise of China. And they want to be the partner of choice is the phrase. They never mentioned the word China.

17:01.36
Speaker
And I was just looking out my head so home hotel window, seeing truckloads of Chinese workers coming into the construction sites, building stuff. for the PNG g government. And that's the kind of very, you know, in your face shift in the the plates of of geopolitics, which is going on all over the Pacific, certainly in terms of China, but actually, it's going on in terms of, as I said, Turkey and East Africa, yeah India and South Asia, all over the place, these shifts are happening. I think that's potentially a good thing.

17:28.31
Speaker
You know, it's better to have, if you're a government in ah like that still relies on aid, and you've got three or four potential donors, you can play them off against each other and get a better deal than if you have to go cap in hand to one.

17:40.08
Speaker
But at the moment, the danger is that parts the world will have zero rather than three or four. And that's what worries me. Yeah, that's very valid. And and you spoke about you know that mixture of loans, grants and other forms of multilateralism make it difficult to compare how countries provide assistance and I guess how much influence they're actually able to achieve from that. But do you see this being a change in the balance of of global influence and and the influence that powers have over ah less developed countries?

18:08.16
Speaker
Well, think it's part of really big shift, which is if America goes out and starts talking about democracy to people anymore, and they're likely to be let met by laughter. So that whole like host fall of the Berlin wall Wall kind of let's go and sort of you know end of history, let's let's bring about peaceful change towards war more democratic rule of law, institution stability, that's all that's all looking incredibly fragile. Now, Europe has never been as as effective, I think, as the USA in in pursuing that party because it's so internalized, there's so many internal issues to deal with.

18:43.69
Speaker
What that means in terms of the politics is that an increasing number of leaders in all over the world, global south and elsewhere, who are already autocratic in tendency can now point to lots of success stories ah amongst the autocrats and lots of failures amongst the slightly less autocratic.

19:00.93
Speaker
There's going to be a ah big shake shake up of these global conversations about What is development? What is the future? The idea that we're all getting to Denmark no longer looks convincing if it ever did, that there's a whole lot of other stuff going on. And that's going to make these conversations very different. And large parts of the West, such as the USA, don't even want to be in those conversations anymore.

19:26.93
Speaker
So that's you know that really is abandoning the playing field to other players. As we discussed, and in response to very significant geopolitical issues and very significant and very real security risks, the UK and other European countries, combined with domestic political priorities, have reduced their aid budgets and redirected the funds towards military and defence spending. How do you interpret this shift in priorities?

19:54.08
Speaker
I mean, it's depressing. There's a calculation by the Centre for Global Development, which is an excellent number-crunching NGO think tank, that if the UK stays with the current amount of aid that it takes out, skims off the top to spend on refugee housing costs in the UK, its overseas aid budget will only be smaller than Hungary's within Europe, right? It will be 0.1% of GNI, not the 0.7% of gross national income that we actually had law ah gro national income that we that we but she had a laura on

20:25.21
Speaker
until very recently. So this is an extraordinary collapse. you know And I think it's it's come about partly because of the massive financial pressures on governments, but those aren't new, but it's also, it was seen as easy money by other parts of government before this.

20:41.05
Speaker
So there was a yeah bits of Whitehall, the British government system were constantly trying to raid the aid budget to boost their budgets. on the housing and yeah refugee costs and so on. And now it's an open season because of UKID and because of this hollowing out that I talked about earlier, it's open season on aid budgets and very little in the way of defence.

20:59.86
Speaker
And so what are the actual impacts on the ground for our listeners today that are listening to this podcast on their on their way into work or at the gym this morning? What is the impact? What does this mean for people that are displaced by conflict, that are living through natural disasters or that are just suffering from from decades of underdevelopment? What does this actually mean for them?

21:17.71
Speaker
Well, I was looking at ah at something from the World Health Organization today, which says, when you cut funding in this way, it takes a few weeks or months for the effects to really show. But the WHO says that drug and supply chains on tuberculosis, which is a major and worsening problem as you get drug resistant all forms of it, right is already unraveling in nine countries, right? So those painfully established ways of treating and reducing and hopefully ending TB, which is a big killer, unraveling in nine countries.

21:47.10
Speaker
Just in one country, Sudan, four and half million people rely on food aid at risk, right? So we are not seeing yet mass deaths, but it's highly probable that we will unless something changes. So I think it's, you know, are we really going to wait until we have the television pictures before we take this seriously? There is clearly an enormous set of risks on health, on on malnutrition. And that doesn't even take in what happens when the next war breaks out or the next earthquake hits or the next drought when the URN will go, really, sorry, guys, we've got no money. And that response will just be really, really inadequate, even compared to previous years where you hunt de funded underfunded UN appeals were always a problem.

22:32.55
Speaker
So there is no silver lining on this one. This is just, yeah, this is crap. Yeah, no, no, I totally understand. so what what what do you think the next, because of course, you know, every couple of years we we do get a, you know, a tsunami like like the one we got on Boxing Day or Christmas, the day after Christmas in 2014, or like the big earthquake in Pakistan in 2005. And of course, there's been countless wars and conflicts since then.

22:57.58
Speaker
But what happens during the next conflict? Do you think governments will magically reallocate resources back? Or do you think it's just going to be suffering for those communities that are affected by the disasters? think this comes back to the fact that aid is only one form of response.

23:11.70
Speaker
um So I think smart people who are trying to make the world a better place, despite the headwinds, as economists say, are going to be thinking, where can support come from for the next tsunami? Let's call it tsunami, right?

23:24.64
Speaker
There are areas of society which have a lot of money which could help. A key one is diasporas, right? There are big, big diaspora organisations. They're often...

23:35.28
Speaker
informally networked, not on the map of the big eight donors, they're sending money home already and they always step up after an emergency. So is there something that yeah something where outsiders can help? Maybe not. Maybe they've just leave it to that.

23:47.77
Speaker
But that's going to be one source. Another source, as I said, faith. Faithgiving is ah massive, massive element. So there's one kind of giving which I'm really interested called Zakat, which is within the Islamic tradition, where um every good Muslim is supposed to give a 40th of their wealth, not just their income, their wealth. This is a global wealth tax, which has been going for centuries and has been entirely not noticed by the lefties who are advocating for a global wealth tax.

24:14.84
Speaker
A 40th of their wealth every year is supposed to go to good causes. It tends to just get sent down the local mosque, given to the local imam, used to pay a couple of neighbours' kids to get through school, all good stuff.

24:25.58
Speaker
But the governance is really yeah not clear. And you know a new generation of Muslims in many countries are saying, actually, i think we can do better than that. That estimates of Zakat amount to $1 to $2 trillion dollars a year, right? So four to eight times more than the whole of global aid in the good times.

24:42.63
Speaker
And we don't know where it goes. So and then if you add to that Christian tithing, you know, massive amounts of money going into Christian churches. There's money around, which I think activists who are who care about this stuff need to start taking much more seriously.

24:57.34
Speaker
And then I think that this this localization question, I teach at the LSE, a lot of our students were hoping to get jobs in the global aid architecture. Some of them still will because the LSE is a great brand and all that, but they're really panicking.

25:10.15
Speaker
And so we're having, you know, sort of half therapy, half analysis sessions with a bunch of them. And my advice to them is at the moment, sit back a little bit and watch and see what is emerging from the ashes in terms of these new shoots, these new forms of organisation, these new regional local networks which come up and fill the space that is being vacated by the big global institutions and then decide where you want to join.

25:37.49
Speaker
And in the meantime, it's probably best to go and get some more skills, to go and work in a sector which is likely to be relevant to any form of aid in the future, like the financial sector or extractives or medicine or whatever it is, ah the law.

25:51.97
Speaker
But ah you may well, in a couple of years, be looking at an aid sector, which is pretty unrecognizable from where it has been up to now. So don't try and jump onto the ship sinking ship. Stand back and see which other little boats are bobbing up around it And if I can ask you a little bit about your work at the activism, influence and and change department at the London School of Economics, I think it's really quite interesting.

26:14.62
Speaker
Some of the work that I think that that you and your your colleagues are doing around how small groups of committed activists can succeed in influencing power and ah supporting and strengthening fragile democracies. Can you tell me a little bit about the the research and and what you're doing and what what what you're finding?

26:32.67
Speaker
Yeah, certainly. i mean the um I mean, the origins of this is that um I came out of my work at Oxfam. One of my last sort of exercises at Oxfam was to publish a book called How Change Happens, which was trying to actually understand that the mechanics of change.

26:45.70
Speaker
NGOs tend to focus on the what, you know, we need to do this, we need to do that. And increasingly, I became really fascinated by the plumbing, by which campaigns are successful. yeah How do they organize themselves? What are the narratives they use?

26:57.68
Speaker
How do they get the timing right? How do they build a alliances? These kind of questions. So I became a bit of a sort of a nerd about change processes. When I went to the LSE, I started a small master's course, which has grown, and now has 75 master's students, which look at this, the plumbing question.

27:16.03
Speaker
We found that we were getting more and more requests from the UN, INGOs, saying things like, and this is a quote from a UN person, in the UN we get promoted for being good at tents and blankets.

27:26.52
Speaker
And then suddenly we have to try and stop the Saudis from bombing Yemen. We have no idea how to do that. So across the aid sector, people have realized that there's a role for trying to influence the wider system, not just delivering nice, neat projects, whether they're long-term development or humanitarian, and that there is a set of tools and a set of practices and a vast number of case studies of failure and success, which can help you get better at that.

27:50.52
Speaker
So the new program, which we only launched this month, It's got a blog, which I urge people to come and read. It's got to have some research on on case studies, what works, what doesn't.

28:01.59
Speaker
We hope to provide a refuge for exhausted activists to come and write up their experiences at some point. We want to look at the whole question, the really difficult question of how do you evaluate the impact of influencing? Whenever anything changes, it has at least 10 organizations saying, yeah, that was us.

28:15.49
Speaker
And if that campaign fails, no one stands up and says that was us. So, yeah. You've a real question on evaluation there, which I think needs to be answered if we're going to get serious about this stuff. So I'm very excited about this because I think this is, you know, connecting it to the previous conversation.

28:30.10
Speaker
if it's If it's no longer possible to do it yourself because you don't have huge amounts of money to deliver schools and hospitals, then... the ability to influence government and the state and the private sector to do a better job on health and education or whatever else it is becomes more salient.

28:47.58
Speaker
And so we need to get more literate, more literate in terms of understanding power, understanding government systems, and then the tactics you can use to do good stuff. And that's what the new program is about.

29:00.25
Speaker
And Duncan, with a declining support for democratic institutions and what's widely seen as democratic decline around the world, are grassroots movements now going to be much more effective and the the force for change that we want to see? And if so, what's the elevator pitch and what's the answer? Why are some activist movements more successful than others?

29:20.85
Speaker
Well, I'm not totally they're going to be more effective. They are going to be more salient, right? So, I mean, one of the one of the sort of big moments was COVID. where states were overwhelmed by this massive shock.

29:31.35
Speaker
And you saw grassroots organizing all over, from China to India to Brazil to Britain to America. People just started doing stuff, filling that space.

29:41.72
Speaker
Sometimes it was just looking after your neighbors, but it rapidly morphed into much more sort of structural questions as well of corruption and access to you know medicines and things like that.

29:52.04
Speaker
And I imagine that that's going to be the same on the aid business, that this will turbocharge the move to build almost like horizontal connections between grassroots movements to enable them to fill the space, which the INGOs filled before. The INGOs always said, yeah, we want to work with people, but they tended to be the best at fundraising or just ah dominate because they had access to the connections. And and so in some ways, they both supported grassroots organizations, but also were a bit of a an obstacle.

30:23.99
Speaker
So we're going to see whether which one of those was more important. If they're a big obstacle, we're going to see an upsurge of grassroots activism. If actually they were an essential part of it, then grassroots activism is going struggle to go to a bigger scale.

30:37.25
Speaker
In terms of what works, I think we've seen a whole bunch of things around the ability to work at different levels to keep grassroots organizations and individuals motivated, but also to to understand how power and decision-making operates, to be comfortable, to have people who are both capable of being in the corridors of power and and happy spending time in the village listening to what people think is important.

31:00.89
Speaker
Those are rare skills. and It's a kind of leadership which is not valued enough. And when you see those people in operation, they're awesome. So that ability to move between tiers and scales and bring bring power from below into power at the top.

31:15.92
Speaker
Those kind of things, you know, we've got some great examples of them ah all over the world, but we need a lot more of that. I'm just reading a new book by Marshall Gantz, who's one of the gurus of community organizing in the US. s He's been doing it since, you know, um Martin Luther King days, and he's written up his kind of his best, best advice on how to do this stuff. There's gonna lot more interest in those sorts of writers and thinkers, I think, now.

31:39.79
Speaker
Very good. Thanks very much for explaining that, Duncan. And just to wrap up the conversation today, when you look around the world, Duncan, what are the international risks that concern you the most? don't know you've got ah this. is not So, I mean, with my aid hat on, it's that a lot of the progress of the last 80 years could go into reverse on access to education, ah literacy, access to medicines, you know, that we could see a dark, dark,

32:08.64
Speaker
reversal of those fortunes. But on top of that, you've got a whole bunch of risks, new and old, you know, nuclear proliferation. You know, i used to work on nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Back in the day, i studied physics and i got some weird jobs coming to the back of that.

32:22.16
Speaker
That never went away, but it sort of stopped being salient for people. It's going to come back, right? I mean, so I think I'm very worried about nuclear proliferation. I think there's a whole up bunch of but potential new risks around, which AI is what everybody's talking about, but there's nanotech. You know, you're not short of global risks.

32:39.11
Speaker
What global risks need is a global architecture to identify and coordinate responses to them. And that's what worries me is that that is being chipped away. So we're going to have global risks bubbling up, whether it's new zoonotic diseases like COVID or nuclear proliferation or you know something goes crazy on AI and we all go into Terminator and an incredibly weak global architecture to deal with them.

33:01.55
Speaker
So there are, you wanted to end on a happy note, sorry about that. Maybe we need to change the last question on the podcast. but It's usually what are you optimistic about, but um don't do that to me now. I can't even go straight to that after that last bit.

33:13.31
Speaker
No, no, that's fair enough. Well, it is the International Wiz podcast, and and yeah I think you did do a good job of it identifying a few of the silver linings that are coming today. But thanks very much for coming on the podcast today, Duncan. Thank you, Dominic. It's been fun. Well, fun. It's been interesting.

33:26.78
Speaker
Well, that was a great conversation with Dr. Duncan Green. He's a professor in practice and the director of the Activism, Influence and Change Program at the London School of Economics. I really appreciated hearing Duncan's thoughts on the future of aid amidst the global environment where there are simply other priorities.

33:40.80
Speaker
Today's podcast was produced and coordinated by Camilla Mateos-Bettencourt. I'm Dominic Bowen, host of the International Risk Podcast. Thanks very much for listening. We'll speak again next week. Thank you for listening to this episode of the International Risk Podcast.

33:54.72
Speaker
For more episodes and articles, visit theinternationalriskpodcast.com. Follow us on LinkedIn, BlueSquad and Instagram for the latest updates and to ask your questions to our host, Dominic Bowen.

34:05.53
Speaker
See you next time.