It was a pleasure to participate in the 2025 Busan Global Partnership Forum, contributing to Session 2 on country-level ecosystems. I joined the panel as a representative of academia, alongside practitioners and policy makers with deep experience in development co-operation. In this blog, I revisit and reflect further on the key points I raised during that session.
Dr. Gisselquist participating in a panel at the Busan Global Partnership Forum
(Photo credit: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Korea)
Challenges to Inclusive and Collectively Owned Co-operation
Three interrelated challenges stand out. First is the continued need for donors and development partners to be genuinely inclusive. There has been important progress over time—including renewed global commitment to the effectiveness principles—and many of these advances were evident in Busan. At the same time, discussions also highlighted persistent gaps between commitments and practice, which warrant continued attention.
Second is the importance of acknowledging and working to address barriers to inclusivity within partner countries. Governments and institutions that are not perceived as inclusive or representative face obvious challenges in leading inclusive development co-operation processes with legitimacy. Making governance more inclusive is a challenge everywhere, but—in thinking about barriers to country-owned development co-operation—its lack in partner countries is particularly salient.
Third, these challenges are most acute in deeply divided societies—often fragile and conflict-affected settings. Increasingly, the world’s poorest people live in such contexts. If development co-operation is to contribute meaningfully to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, it must be able to work effectively in these environments. This was a central motivation for our recent book, Fragile Aid: Development Cooperation in Weak States and Conflict Contexts, co-edited with Patricia Justino and Andrea Vaccaro (OUP, 2025 – open access).
Strengthening Meaningful Co-operation: What Does the Evidence Say?
Research—including my own—underscores that there are no simple, one-size-fits-all solutions. But there is a large body of research, analysis, and experience from which to build.
Several chapters in Fragile Aid, for instance, highlight the importance of truly bottom-up and politically-informed approaches. Considering the Somalian context, research by Gaël Raballand and colleagues shows how applying a social contract lens–-one attentive to the implicit agreements between citizens and the state regarding their mutual roles and responsibilities—can inform donor interventions. The most resilient social contracts, their work suggests, may be at the most local level—in Somalia, primarily within clans. Focusing on Afghanistan, Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili’s chapter critiques so-called ‘community-driven’ interventions there, arguing that they were, in practice, top-down and neglected customary authority structures. As a result, such interventions undermined the legitimacy and effectiveness of existing local governance institutions.
Another key insight explored in the book is the value of shifting from a notion of “country ownership” to a broader “collective ownership” approach, as argued in the chapter by Debapriya Bhattacharya, Towfiqul Islam Khan, and Najeeba Mohammed Altaf. Drawing on research conducted in six countries across three continents, the authors argue that this approach offers a more promising pathway to effective co-operation and sustainable development outcomes. The chapter examines how collective ownership can be operationalised through the active and substantive participation of multiple stakeholders—including the partner country government, international providers, and other non-state actors—at all stages of the development co-operation process. In the past few years, this shift has also been reflected in the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation’s (GPEDC) monitoring exercise, which encourages and reports on collective accountability and ownership.
Academic research also demonstrates that the record of development assistance in supporting better governance and stronger institutions is uneven. However, it has shown positive impact in many contexts. In some of my other research, including with Miguel Niño-Zarazúa and colleagues, we show that, overall, ‘democracy assistance’—support for free media, human rights, civil society, and elections—has had positive impact on governance, drawing on a systematic review of the literature alongside new cross-country quantitative analysis. A key priority for ongoing work then is to better understand what has worked best (and what has not) and how to learn from that experience, appropriately, across diverse contexts.
The Role of Academia
Participating in the Busan Forum reinforced for me the value of forums that bring together research, policy, and practice. Three reflections stand out.
First, the best research in this area emerges from sustained dialogue with practitioners and policy makers. Such engagement helps to shape the questions we ask, informs interpretation of findings, and provides real-world insights.
Second, concepts, measurement, and methods—which we spend a lot of time thinking about in academia—can sometimes feel distant from immediate policy concerns, but can also add value. For example, by providing considered insight on key concepts such as “ownership,” “inclusivity,” or “governance.”
Relatedly, third, academia can also offer tools and approaches for generalising across cases, i.e. for learning systematically across diverse contexts. How well should experiences of development co-operation in one country, for example, carry to another?
Looking ahead, a key priority for researchers like myself is to reflect on how lessons from past work on development effectiveness apply in a rapidly changing global landscape. Much of our past research on development effectiveness is based on programs funded by traditional donors, yet ‘new’ and Southern donors are playing an increasingly important role. Understanding how far existing insights remain relevant is central to my ongoing research, including a new research project on the future of aid and development co-operation, co-hosted by my centre (the Governance and Social Development Resource Centre—GSDRC) at the University of Birmingham and UNU-WIDER. We will be releasing and hosting seminars on a series of papers starting later this year, and I look forward to continuing these conversations with the GPEDC community.
*This blog post was originally posted on Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation for the original article please visit Inclusive and Collectively Owned Development Co-operation: Reflections from the 2025 Busan Forum | Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation*
Author:
Dr.Rachel M. Gisselquist
Professor in Governance and Development and Director of the Governance and Social Development Resource Centre (GSDRC), University of Birmingham (UK)
