International cooperation for development

International cooperation for development has undergone tectonic shifts. While official development assistance was the cornerstone of planned interaction between the Global North and the Global South during and after the Cold War, it is now, at best, facilitating this interaction and is instead mainly used to accelerate other financial flows. This chapter outlines this tectonic shift in international cooperation for development and analyses how it affects international cooperation for development ‘as it was’, i.e., a relatively stable system governed by the Development Assistance Committee with increasingly more power to influence recipient countries’ internal affairs, and how and to what extent it matters for the Global South. To do this, it analyses the underlying reasons for the shift, focusing in particular on the role of new state and private development actors. The chapter concludes that the tectonic shifts have hitherto neither translated into a fundamentally different perception of what development aid is all about nor have they profoundly changed the power relations between donors and recipients. Despite the major changes, therefore, international development cooperation today bears many resemblances to international development cooperation ‘as it was’.