Development cooperation has become an oddly revealing political object. To some, it is a moral necessity in an unequal and interdependent world. To others, it is a luxury, a hypocrisy, or a convenient mask for national interest. It is attacked as naive idealism and dismissed as cynical power politics, sometimes by the same people and often in the same political moment.
This tension is not new. Aid has never been purely an expression of solidarity, just as it has never been reducible to geopolitical calculation. What is new is the broader political climate in which this tension now plays out. In increasingly polarized democracies, public issues are no longer debated primarily as difficult matters of judgment, trade-off, and institutional choice. They are drawn into moralized camps, identity-based narratives, and loyalty tests. Nuance starts to look like weakness. Ambivalence becomes suspect. The space for defending imperfect but necessary public commitments begins to shrink.
That is why the current crisis around development cooperation matters beyond the aid sector itself. The growing difficulty of justifying aid, whether as solidarity or as strategy, reflects a wider erosion of democratic space: the weakening of the middle terrain where disagreement can still be processed, compromises can still be built, and political responsibility can still be argued without collapsing into either self-righteousness or cynicism.
More than a sectoral crisis
For a long time, development cooperation rested on a delicate balancing act. It could be justified in moral terms, as solidarity with poorer countries and vulnerable populations, while also being defended in pragmatic terms, as contributing to stability, prosperity, and international order. That balance was never intellectually tidy, but politically it worked. It allowed governments, civil society organizations, and citizens with different motivations to support a common enterprise.
Today, that middle ground is shrinking. The OECD recently noted that policymakers can no longer take broad public, political, and financial support for development cooperation for granted and that neither traditional “aid” narratives nor newer “national interest” narratives are working well in a polarized environment. Development cooperation is increasingly criticized from sharply opposing directions, each of which captures part of the truth while making it harder to sustain a broader public justification for aid.
From the populist right, aid is portrayed as wasteful, naive, elitist, or even as a betrayal of “our own people.” Public money, in this view, should not be spent abroad while domestic grievances remain unresolved. Aid becomes a symbol of disconnected cosmopolitanism: evidence that political elites care more about abstract global causes than about citizens at home.
From parts of the progressive left, development cooperation is criticized in very different terms, but with similarly unsettling consequences. Aid is seen as paternalistic, postcolonial, insufficiently transformative, compromised by donor interests, and entangled in structures of domination that it claims to correct. In this view, the language of solidarity too often masks hierarchy, selective compassion, and moral self-congratulation.
Neither critique is entirely wrong. Aid has often been paternalistic. It has also often been instrumentalized. It has served donor interests, reproduced asymmetries, and fallen short of its promises. Yet it remains one of the few institutionalized ways through which states attempt to respond to global inequality and collective vulnerability. The real problem is that we are increasingly losing the democratic space needed to hold these truths together.
The erosion of democratic mediation
Democracy does not require consensus. It requires a shared arena in which disagreement can be expressed, argued through, and processed without every conflict becoming existential. That arena depends on habits of restraint, an acceptance of complexity, and a willingness to acknowledge that political questions rarely have pure or uncontested answers.
That is precisely what is under pressure. V-Dem’s 2025 Democracy Report documents the continued spread of autocratization, while Civicus 2024 reports that civic freedoms are being curtailed in an overwhelming majority of countries and that civil society is under severe attack in 116 of 198 countries and territories.
Across many democracies, public debate has become more polarized, more performative, and more identity-coded. Positions are not simply argued; they are inhabited. Political questions become markers of belonging. To criticize aid is easily read as nationalist selfishness. To defend it is easily caricatured as elite virtue signalling. To ask uncomfortable questions about migration, effectiveness, paternalism, or strategic interest is to risk instant classification into a camp.
Once that happens, democratic debate narrows. Not because disagreement exists, but because disagreement is no longer treated as a legitimate part of shared political life. Opponents are moralized, motives are essentialized, and the space for revision, persuasion, and coalition-building shrinks. As Cherian George argues in the Journal of Democracy, polarization increasingly takes the form of “us-them” divides that make negotiation and compromise nearly impossible and that erode reciprocal respect between political opponents. The result is not a healthier democracy with stronger convictions. It is a harder, thinner democracy, less capable of processing complexity and less able to sustain difficult common commitments.
This matters for development cooperation because aid has always depended on democratic mediation. It has never been politically sustainable on the basis of altruism alone, nor on the basis of national interest alone. It needed a public language in which ethical responsibility and pragmatic calculation could coexist, however uneasily. When that language weakens, aid becomes much harder to defend.
Identity politics and the shrinking civic space
Part of this problem lies in the way identity increasingly structures political conflict. Identity-based claims are not in themselves anti-democratic. On the contrary, struggles for recognition, dignity, inclusion, and historical justice have often expanded democracy by exposing exclusions that universalist rhetoric too easily ignored. But when politics becomes rigidly identity-coded, something changes. Debate shifts from persuasion to positioning. The aim is no longer to build broad, imperfect coalitions around shared institutions or contested goods, but to defend the moral integrity of one’s camp.
Politics then becomes a struggle not only over interests or ideas, but over legitimacy itself: who has the right to speak, whose claims count, which language is acceptable, whose motives are irredeemably suspect. In that climate, civic space contracts. Not only because formal freedoms may come under pressure, but because the informal conditions of pluralist democracy deteriorate. People become less willing to listen across difference. Institutions become less able to mediate conflict. Public language becomes less capable of carrying ambiguity and contradiction.
Development cooperation sits directly in the path of this dynamic. It is highly symbolic, only indirectly visible in most people’s everyday lives, and deeply entangled with questions of nation, responsibility, race, class, borders, and global order. That makes it especially vulnerable to cultural and political trench warfare. It becomes easy to weaponize and difficult to discuss.
Aid as a mirror of a broader democratic malaise
This is why aid matters beyond aid. Its legitimacy crisis reflects a wider democratic contradiction. Liberal democracies still rely on some notion of solidarity beyond the self, the tribe, or the nation. They also rely on some ability to negotiate interest without pretending that all politics is morally pure. Development cooperation has long been one of the places where these two dimensions, solidarity and interest, have met in uneasy but workable ways.
What we are witnessing now is the fraying of that settlement. If aid can only be defended as moral purity, it will eventually collapse under the weight of its hypocrisies. If it can only be defended as strategic utility, it loses any ethical distinctiveness and becomes just another arm of foreign policy. That risk is no longer hypothetical. Recent ODI analysis of the EU debate notes that more transactional narratives around aid are becoming more explicit, particularly in relation to defence, security, migration, and competitiveness. In both cases, something larger is lost: the democratic capacity to sustain public commitments that are neither innocent nor cynical, but politically argued, morally contested, and institutionally mediated.
That is what makes the issue so significant. The fate of aid is not only about aid budgets or donor fatigue. It tells us something about whether democracies can still justify responsibility beyond their borders without collapsing into sentimentality on one side or brutal transactionalism on the other.
What needs to be defended
The answer is not to retreat into nostalgic defenses of an older aid consensus. That consensus was always more fragile, more selective, and more self-serving than its defenders often admitted. Nor is the answer to celebrate the current polarization as if it were proof of democratic vitality. A democracy in which every disagreement becomes a loyalty test is not becoming stronger. It is becoming more brittle.
What needs to be defended is not a sanitized image of development cooperation, but the democratic space in which its purposes, limits, and contradictions can still be debated seriously.
That means defending a language of international responsibility that is honest about interests without reducing everything to them. It means acknowledging the colonial and paternalistic legacies of aid without concluding that solidarity is impossible or always suspect. It means resisting nationalist attacks on global responsibility, while also resisting the temptation to treat all criticism as a moral failing. Above all, it means rebuilding the middle terrain where complexity can be spoken without embarrassment and where political judgment is not immediately swallowed by tribal alignment.
Development cooperation’s double legitimacy crisis is therefore not just a policy problem. It is a warning signal. When a democracy can no longer argue with nuance about why it should care beyond its borders, it is not only solidarity that is in trouble. Democracy itself is losing one of its essential capacities: the capacity to hold together difference, disagreement, and responsibility in a common political space.
This blog post was authored by Prof. Dr. Nadia Molenaers (IOB – Universiteit Antwerpen). ChatGPT was used to polish the draft, to detect overlap and repetition and improve the overall flow of the text. The arguments, ideas and content of the blog were entirely developed by the author. A summary of the blogpost was also published in Dutch on the MO* magazine blogsite.