Earlier in November, I spoke to Amanda Reekie for the Southern Hemisphere’s Connected Change campaign. The discussion sparked some interesting ideas, which I recorded and turned into an article with the help of Gemini and ChatGPT.
For a long time, those of us working on social justice and “development” operated inside a kind of exoskeleton or scaffolding.+
By this, I mean a global infrastructure of ideas, money, and diplomatic cover that held us up: liberal democracy as the default language, progressive social values as the horizon, and an aid system that paid for a large share of the work and offered some protection when governments turned hostile. If your government got too authoritarian or too conservative, you could count on the U.S. or a European embassy, a UN agency or a big foundation to create safe spaces and, occasionally, to push back.
That exoskeleton is collapsing.
The exoskeleton collapses
You can see it everywhere: in the U.S., across Europe, and now in Canada, governments are cutting aid budgets, hollowing out their development agencies, and tightening the link between every pound or dollar spent and a narrow definition of “our” national interest. The old rhetoric of solidarity, rights and multilateralism is giving way to a blunt question: what’s in it for us?
Philanthropic foundations are also shifting. Many are quietly refocusing on their own countries and treading more carefully around issues such as gender, minority rights, democracy, and polarisation. The more progressive foundations haven’t disappeared, but the language is being toned down; the appetite for being dragged into culture wars is limited. At the same time, conservative philanthropy feels emboldened. It no longer sees itself as working against the grain of its own political systems – and this will tilt the balance of funding, even if the total pot of money doesn’t shrink dramatically.
All of this has consequences in the low and middle-income countries, including in Africa, because that exoskeleton didn’t just bring money. It also constrained power at home. Many political and bureaucratic elites were always uncomfortable with the liberal, rights-based agenda attached to aid – but they played along to avoid trouble with the U.S. embassy, the EU delegation, or whichever donor mattered most that year.
Now they no longer feel they have to.
You can already hear it in the public discourse: the idea that individual rights are not sacred; that minorities don’t necessarily need special protection; that “Western” gender or LGBTQ+ agendas can be openly rejected without fear of losing budget support or being named and shamed in some OECD report. The space to roll back rights and pluralism is wider. And the international incentives to resist that rollback are weaker.
That’s the structural shift in the environment for social justice work. We are losing the exoskeleton.
When the scaffolding goes, who stands and how?
The implications are not the same for everyone.
For some organisations, this will be a relief. Let’s be honest: the last decade of proposal templates, logframes, and mandatory sections on diversity, inclusion, gender mainstreaming and “leaving no one behind” created a lot of performative behaviour. Many organisations talked about these issues because they had to, not because they wanted to. The checklists were a ticket to Canadian, British or European funding – not an expression of deeply held beliefs.
If you never really believed in gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, or meaningful participation, then the weakening of donor conditionalities can feel like freedom. You can drop the language, loosen the commitments, and go back to what you wanted to do all along. There will still be money for plenty of things – especially if you are not too fussy about who you take it from.
For others, this moment is much harder.
There are organisations – many of them – for whom these agendas are not add-ons but the core of who they are. They did not talk about rights, equality and democracy to tick a donor box. They talked about them because they matter. For these organisations, “doubling down” is the only option. But they will need to rethink where their support comes from.
That means looking for:
- Local and regional philanthropies that genuinely share their values;
- Domestic constituencies – professional associations, social movements, individual supporters – willing to put money and political capital behind them; and
- New business models: memberships, services, and consultancy work that don’t hollow out their mission.
What this looks like for think tanks
For think tanks and policy research organisations – the actors I know best – I see two extreme responses, and many hybrids in between:
- Liberation from the tyranny of the template: Some think tanks will feel genuinely liberated. They can stop twisting their agendas to fit yet another “call for proposals” written in Ottawa or London and return to the issues that actually matter in Accra, Nairobi or Johannesburg. They may become smaller, poorer, but more honest and politically grounded.
- Values-driven diversification: Others will hold their ground on rights and equality, but accept that the era of long, comfortable core grants from international aid agencies is largely over. They will invest in building domestic and regional alliances, experiment with earning models, and be more intentional about the kind of philanthropy they work with. This is already evident in how some African think tanks are positioning themselves as domestic policy actors first and “development partners” second.
Consultants in the international development field will also adapt. Many of them have treated values as compliance: something to reference in a corporate social responsibility section, not a line in the sand. With donors relaxing the pressure, they’ll work with whoever offers the contract. The market for “technical assistance” is likely to become even more politically heterogeneous.
From beggars to peers
There is another, more uncomfortable layer to this change, which I have heard more and more in conversations in Africa and Latin America.
It goes something like this: nobody respects the beggar. Prof. Emmanuel Pondi, Rector of The ICT University, was backed by a room full of agreement at the Central Africa Think Tank Forum.
If South African HIV/AIDS patients depend on U.S. taxpayers for their antiretrovirals, something is deeply wrong. South Africa is a G20 country; why can’t it fund essential medicine for its own citizens? How did we get used to NGOs and bilateral agencies paying for the basics in countries that are rich enough to fund all of it?
When the Trump administration cut parts of USAID, the first wave of panic came from contractors and consultants – the “aid industry” workforce. LinkedIn is filled with posts saying, “Please hire my colleague, she worked on PEPFAR, he worked on programme X.” I don’t want to trivialise their livelihoods, but it was striking. Only later did the conversation shift back to the people who lost actual services – the patients, the communities.
In parallel, a different narrative was gaining ground: we need to step up. We can’t demand a more equal global order and then send the bill for our basic services to somebody else’s parliament. You can’t ask for an equal seat at the table if your hand is still out.
I hear more and more leaders saying: “We may not like how the aid cuts have come about, but the dependency they reveal is unacceptable.” That doesn’t mean people won’t suffer in the short term – they will. But it does open the door to a deeper rebalancing of responsibility and dignity.
The connections we actually need
In previous work, I’ve argued that countries are no longer passive recipients of Aid (with a capital A), but increasingly active consumers of ideas, technologies and services. They want to hire the same consultants, universities and firms that rich countries use – not a second-tier development industry that only exists for the South.
If the old exoskeleton of aid and diplomacy is fading, what should replace it? The instinctive answer in recent years has been “localisation”, “regionalisation”, “decolonisation” – and some of that language has been important and necessary. But it has also produced a few strange side effects.
One is the proliferation of branded “African”, “Latin American” or “regional” frameworks and approaches in fields like evaluation. Some of this is genuinely grounded in local epistemologies and politics. Some of it, frankly, has been driven by Northern funders needing to show they are “doing decolonisation” – and Southern actors keen to capture the funding on offer.
We need to be honest about that and ask: are we responding to our own priorities, or to someone else’s narrative of what our priorities should be?
I think we need two types of connections, and we need them both to be much stronger.
- Domestic, cross-sector coalitions
In many African countries, the international development sector has operated on its own island. In Kenya, until recently, at least, it paid better salaries than finance or energy; it has its own conferences, vocabulary, heroes and scandals. Its implicit audience is often foreign: the donor, the embassy, the international NGO.
The result is that many of the people working on “social justice” or “governance” have surprisingly weak ties to:
- Local business groups;
- Unions;
- Professional associations;
- City-level authorities;
- Sector regulators and industry bodies.
Solutions, however, require exactly these coalitions. You don’t reform an energy subsidy regime, a school system or an urban housing policy by talking only to the aid sector, a couple of reformist ministries and spending days at a time in conferences in the U.S. or Europe. You need think tanks, activists, unions, firms, city governments and national politicians in the same room – and not just for one workshop.
So one urgent task, as the exoskeleton recedes, is to turn our gaze from foreign donors to our own societies. To build domestic multistakeholder ecosystems that can carry reforms without needing a foreign guarantor. Some Latin American and African think tanks are already investing more in domestic outreach, private-sector engagement, and alliances that go beyond the usual “policy community”. But we are still only at the beginning.
- International peer-to-peer links between equals
The second type of connection we need is international, but not in the way the development sector has traditionally imagined it.
For decades, cross-border relationships have been mediated by funders, international development NGOs, and think tanks. A Ghanaian education think tank that asks a donor for a partner in Europe will almost certainly be connected to an international development think tank in London or Brussels – not to a domestic education think tank in Madrid, Berlin or Manchester.
The problem is that these international development think tanks work in a completely different political universe. They do not deal with the capital-P Politics of domestic fiscal or education reforms; they operate in the safer, more abstract world of “global development policy”. When a Southern think tank wants to understand how another country runs its schools or hospitals, what it really needs is a peer that works on those issues at home, inside the messy politics of that system.
In an article on equitable partnerships, I argued that the obvious partners for a domestic policy think tank in the South are other domestic policy think tanks, wherever they are located. Education think tanks with education think tanks. Health think tanks with health think tanks. Not by default with international development think tanks.
The same applies beyond think tanks. If a South African city is grappling with transport planning, the most useful peer might be a German or Brazilian city – not a “mobility in developing cities” project run from Washington. If a Kenyan regulator wants to make sense of fintech, they may learn more from colleagues in Singapore or the UK’s FCA than from a workshop on “inclusive finance in the Global South”.
This is very close to what I called “unmediated support” a decade ago: governments, firms, universities, professional bodies and think tanks building direct ties with their counterparts elsewhere, without an international development intermediary standing in the middle and filtering everything through its own logic.
Stepping outside the frame
So what does all this mean for think tanks grounded on sincere social justice values, and for the broader ecosystem around them?
First, it means accepting that the old scaffolding will not come back in anything like its previous form. We can’t base our strategies on the hope that the exoskeleton will be rebuilt. We need to learn to stand, walk and – eventually – run without it.
Second, it means being more deliberate about where we invest our limited relational energy. Do we keep pouring time into donor-designed “partnership platforms” that connect us to the same small circle of international development actors? Or do we spend more time finding and working with real peers – in business, government, unions, domestic think tanks – who share our problems and can actually solve them with us?
Finally, it means asking ourselves some uncomfortable questions about the stories we have internalised. Are we promoting “African frameworks” because they help us think more clearly and act more effectively in African politics? Or because they look good in a donor report? Are we embracing South–South cooperation as a dogma, or are we willing to learn from whoever has the most relevant experience, whether they are in Benin, Brazil or Germany?
The collapse of the exoskeleton is frightening. It will expose many organisations that were held up more by the structures around them than by their strengths. But it is also an opportunity to move from a politics of mediation and dependency to one of peers and responsibility.
If we want that future, we cannot keep behaving like beggars. We have to behave – and connect – like equals.