International Development Reimagined: Evolution, Critique, and the Search for What Comes Next

4 Credits.

This course examines the past, present, and future of international development assistance, tracing how ideas about how change happens have shaped the institutions, incentives, and practices of aid. Beginning with the modernization paradigm that guided post-war development and the rise of logframes and projectized aid, the course explores successive critiques and reform movements, including systems thinking, adaptive management, and political economy approaches. As traditional aid models face pressure from multiple directions—geopolitical fragmentation, domestic political constraints in donor countries, the rise of alternative financing mechanisms, and demands for demonstrable results—we examine critical questions about the future of the sector: Will development assistance become purely transactional, driven by donor interests rather than recipient needs? How will the growth of blended finance, impact investing, and private sector partnerships change the nature of development work and the types of problems that receive attention? What gets lost—and what might be gained—as philanthropic actors and south-south cooperation expand their influence? How do digital technologies and AI reshape both the possibilities and power dynamics of development interventions? Students will analyze how competing “theories of change” reflect deeper epistemological debates about what counts as evidence, whose knowledge matters, and how learning and accountability interact in large bureaucracies. The course combines conceptual readings with practical exercises, inviting students to assess how current trends such as localization, multipolarity, and systems change as well as the emergence of new actors and voices will redefine the purpose and structure of international cooperation in the decades ahead.