Finnish development practitioners experienced a painful déjà vu after the recent parliamentary election. The two main winners were parties that carried out massive aid cuts in 2016. But to form a government, they need the Swedish People’s Party, which has called for an increase in aid spending. As negotiations enter the fourth week, Marikki Karhu and Inka Hopsu offer this analysis.

Afghanistan is burdened by multiple crises, and there is an urgent need for innovative collective global action. The upcoming Global Refugee Forum in December 2023 is a key opportunity to break the current deadlock. Najeeba Wazefadost and Evan Jones write that a strategic group of 15 donors – the so-called Support Platform for the Solutions Strategy for Afghan Refugees – where Japan and Switzerland are key members, is strategically placed to re-ignite regional support for displaced Afghans, both in and outside the country.

Nordic aid is up for a major remake. In Sweden and Denmark, new political alliances took power in 2022 and the war in Ukraine will dominate policymaking in all four countries in the months to come.

Espen Barth Eide, Norway’s Minister for Climate and Environment, has just signed a new climate and environment deal with Indonesia. It appears support to civil society and independent scientific research are not among the priorities, researchers from Chr. Michelsens Institute write.

Several African countries have a huge overcapacity in the power sector, but consumers lack electricity. Production is often locked into long-term contracts at high prices while the grid remains underdeveloped. As donors and investors push for renewable energy in Africa, they must take a more transparent and holistic approach or risk delaying the transition to clean energy, Rasmus Hundsbæk Pedersen and Ole Winckler Andersen at DIIS write. 

Five Nordic church leaders call for Nordic governments to show solidarity in the face of growing poverty, food insecurity and climate disaster. Don’t use aid to fund vaccines, domestic refugee costs and climate, they write.

Diverting scarce aid resources risks worsening on-going humanitarian crises around the world. The global consequences of redirecting aid and attention towards the Ukraine response are extremely worrying, Charlotte Slente of Danish Refugee Council writes.

The global vaccine initiative COVAX aimed to procure 2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine in 2021 to accelerate efforts towards vaccine equity. By the end of the year, it had delivered only 910 million doses, more than half of these through donations. Antoine de Bengy Puyvallée and Katerini T. Storeng explain how donated doses came to dominate COVAX’s vaccine supply and they unpack the politics of vaccine sharing.  

Decades of being drip-fed on deleterious forms of foreign aid have caused African countries and institutions to wither. But they have done so blissfully, until the COVID-19 pandemic unmasked the primordial selfishness of the Global North. Olusoji Adeyi, former Director of Health and Nutrition at the World Bank, challenges donor governments and African leaders to break out of an endless cycle of ineffectual aid.

Forty-one billion dollars. That’s what aid agencies need to help people facing war, disease and hunger around the world next year. It’s more than this year. More than ever before, in fact, writes Martin Griffiths, UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs.

Can linking NGOs to traditional Afghan community institutions create a new humanitarian paradigm, and will the international community be willing to let go? Gry Synnevåg and Karim Merchant reflect on how to support Afghanistan under Taliban rule.

As global challenges mount, politicians increasingly view development aid budgets as a source of easy money to fund any and all good things. Whether climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic or the migration crisis, global goods have become integrated with aid, based on a convoluted narrative that equates rich countries’ own interests with the mission of eradicating poverty.

Four Nordic church groups and Christian Aid say small farmers should be the main focus of the UN Food Summit. Reforming agricultural subsidies and helping farmers transition to agroecology can reduce poverty, conserve biodiversity and address climate change, they write.

The bilateral climate forest agreement was meant to be a model for the world. Instead, it was based on a clunky institutional architecture and stands today as a reminder of why condition-laden ODA projects have little impact on rising deforestation, Andrew Hook and Timothy Laing write.

A new Danish law opens for the export of Denmark’s asylum obligations to a third country. Having covered Nordic foreign policy for three decades, we have never seen a betrayal of joint Nordic values on this scale. Social Democratic parties have previously built and defended the UN-based human rights system at home and abroad. Now a Social Democratic prime minister has joined forces with right-wing parties to dismantle it.

A proposed bond scheme inspired by IFFIm, which aims to trigger a massive expansion in aid, won’t work, writes Desmond McNeill at the Centre for Development and Environment. The aid would not be additional and the scheme ignores the key problem of weak states in the neediest countries.

In many rich countries, discussion of COVID-19 revolves around the pace of vaccine deployment and the steps being taken towards lifting restrictions on social and economic interaction, but in most low- and middle-income countries the picture looks starkly different. Not only are COVID-19 infections and deaths increasing as more transmissible variants take hold, but the knock-on impact on other diseases continues to escalate, writes Peter Sands, Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

The international covid pandemic response, ACT-Accelerator, which marks its one-year anniversary, is short USD 20 billion. Addressing climate change will cost many billions more, far exceeding what ODA budgets can cover. Sony Kapoor, CEO of the Nordic think tank NIFTYS, proposes a plan to make these funds available now.

The principles of safety and dignity must not only guide the pursuit of durable solutions, but also the return of rejected asylum seekers to Afghanistan. Successful return involves much more than putting people on a plane. Jared Rowell, Afghanistan Country Director for the Danish Refugee Council, and Evan Jones at the Kabul-based Asia Displacement Solutions Platform write.

Norway’s Development Minister Dag-Inge Ulstein has been a tireless advocate for global vaccine equity and the government has deployed billions of aid crowns to back up that work. We applaud these efforts, but he has made one big mistake that might now plague him at home.

More than 80 per cent of people in Norway, Sweden and Denmark think it is unacceptable for rich countries to buy their way to the front of the vaccine queue, according to a recent survey. Norwegian Church Aid, Act Church of Sweden and DanChurchAid call on Nordic governments to work harder for vaccine equity.

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