Development cooperation is under pressure to change. The traditional aid model – a resource transfer from North to South – is outdated. There are only 36 low-income countries left in the world. Two-thirds of the poorest people live in middle-income countries. Eradicating poverty has become more complex. Aid is no longer used to only address income poverty but also a large variety of development challenges, including climate change, inequality and insecurity.

Is it inevitable that development cooperation extends its scope to address such challenges, or would it make more sense to retain the focus on poverty reduction and concentrate on an ever smaller number of mostly fragile countries? Can development cooperation actors produce added-value at all in globalised policy fields where numerous other actors interfere? And against this backdrop, what is the future of major development cooperation agencies?

Naohiro Kitano, Deputy Director of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Research Institute, and Yasutami Shimomura, Professor Emeritus at Hosei University in Tokyo, addressed these and other issues as high-ranking experts in the development cooperation field. What makes their views particularly interesting is the fact that Japanese aid models have differed from those of Western OECD countries since the very beginning. 

Thorsten Giehler brought in the perspective of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), drawing from his experience as Head of "Policy and Strategy" in GIZ's Corporate Development Unit. Stephan Klingebiel, head of department “Bi- and multilateral Development Cooperation” at the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), chaired the session, invited questions and comments from the audience.

The event was part of a lecture series that features eminent scholars as well as high-ranking officials from the Managing Global Governance (MGG) network. The MGG programme, which goes on to the 12th round in 2014, engages highly qualified young professionals from emerging economies in a dialogue on global governance issues. Programme components include a two-month Global Governance School (GGS) at DIE, training sessions for leadership and personal skills development, a two-week seminar at the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin as well as an Expert Lab with German and European host organisations. MGG is jointly implemented by DIE and GIZ on behalf of the German Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development (BMZ).