Who Cares About Development?

I have just finished reading Wendy Harcourt’s book Conundrums of Care: Feminist Entanglements in Critical Development Studies. Over the last few weeks, I have been snatching moments at airports and after early morning school runs to journey through her personal stories, activist experiences, and academic reflections. Snatching these moments and giving them to myself has been a joyous act of self-care. It has also been an opportunity to spend time on a question which currently occupies me at work and at home: who cares about development?

International Development is in crisis. As has been widely discussed in the news, the sector is currently facing crippling funding shortages and a legitimacy deficit which leave many wondering whether it is worth saving at all. As multilateralism strains under the pressure of Trump 2.0, and populist politics polarises local and global communities, many critical development studies scholars, such as me, are left wondering what the development project of the future should be. And if we should have one at all.

In February 2025 the recently established UK Charity Diversity in Development published its evidence review A Profession for the Privileged? Towards a More Inclusive International Development Sector. The numbers are stark. Only 22 percent of staff in the former UK Government Department for International Development came from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and 64 percent of international development students at UK universities have parents in the highest two occupational categories. Many development organisations simply do not collect data on socioeconomic inclusion. A profession for the privileged indeed.

The Diversity in Development report findings are sadly not a surprise. Research has told us that international development professionals too often occupy an ‘aidland’ of self-designated experts moving quickly from one place to another. In doing so they displace other locally positioned knowledge in favour of neocolonial solutions intricately connected with global trade and geopolitics. In response, the last decade has seen an important, sustained, and challenging conversation about the ways in which development can be decolonised.

Decolonising development is not a task for the fainthearted. It is not tinkering around the edges with reforms. It requires profound structural transformation and a tearing out of its roots. A 2024 exhibition at the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève laid bare the co-constitutive relationship between colonial violence and the founding of humanitarianism. If International Development is, as some have said, founded on the very dichotomies it seeks to overcome, why care about its potential demise?

We might care because it is possible to see the current crisis in the International Development sector as an opportunity to do things better. We can learn from Sweden’s push for feminist foreign policy. We can learn from the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation’s increase of development aid focused on equitable partnership and responsibility. We can learn from countless efforts by people themselves to advocate for equal treatment and dignity.

For me, International Development is the belief in a collective effort to ensure that we can all live lives of dignity. We need to do this through dismantling historical structures of oppression which continue to live on in political and economic systems. We need to do this by redistributing the resources that only some of us accumulate, so that we may all benefit from them. International Development is a belief that the lives of others we may never meet are of equal value to our own. It is a project of care.

Feminists have long articulated the power of an ethics of care which emphasises mutual connectedness of human life, and the deep connection between the personal and the structural. Recently, arguments have been made for an ethics of care to inform global citizenship. This moves firmly away from any sense of care as inherently soft, feminine, or personal, and towards care as a political and powerful stance against inequality and injustice. 

If International Development were to have care as its central organising idea the current situation would look very different. We would be asking how to address the wage differentials between ‘international’ and ‘local’ staff, how to support the emotional labour and trauma of development professionals which feed toxic work cultures, and we would be doing a lot more listening than telling. As Wendy Harcourt puts it, it is through connecting more deeply with care that development can “challenge and change destructive economic and environmental practices of capitalist development processes”.

We should all care about development. We should care about who benefits and who loses from the current crisis of climate, economy, and multilateral politics. We should care about the continued human suffering and indignity caused by the way we organise ourselves politically, economically, and geographically. Most of all we should care about how the sector could be transformed to foster a global ethics of care.

March 2026