Development—A Crowded Field

Today, the number and diversity of partners working on international development is vastly different than just a couple of decades ago. For example, the amount of Official Development Assistance (ODA) distributed through nongovernmental channels has increased tenfold since 1990 and it’s estimated that there are as many as 30,000 national nongovernmental organizations in developing countries.¹

The proliferation of actors is a reason both for excitement and concern. More resources available and more people working to address global problems would be a good thing. But according to scholars Jean-Michel Severino and Olivier Ray, who have studied the trend, right now “We are at a phase of international policies where thousands of actors are playing different ball games in the same field with no referee!”²

Volunteers trained through a CRS-supported polio program distribute polio vaccinations in the form of two liquid drops. Some of the greatest successes of multilateral aid have occurred in health. Both the elimination of smallpox and the near-elimination of polio were multilateral efforts.

Coordinating the actions of so many diverse partners may sometimes appear to be more challenging than solving some of the world’s most urgent problems. In the United States, private giving now exceeds ODA.³ Private giving includes everything from philanthropies to small groups of “friends” organizing themselves on Facebook.

This is where the value of formal structures such as the G-20 becomes apparent: they can steer good intentions into effective collective action. Once countries agree to act, their joint efforts channeled through multilateral instruments have a power that is unmatched. The instruments of the future will need to harness the resources that all the new actors bring to the challenge of solving global problems.