Professor Andy Sumner explores the future of global aid amid Trump's return, rising nationalism, and shifting power. Discover how these changes connect to key themes in the online International Development MSc at King’s.
This guest post is by Professor Andy Sumner, Programme Leader for the online International Development MSc.
In 2025, Donald Trump returned to the White House. USAID was closed. Possibly a third of global aid will disappear or be redirected. This has led many to ask: will aid survive? The short answer is yes—but in a more fragmented and politicised form.
For students interested in the International Development MSc at King’s College London, this question is more than a headline: it opens a window onto key themes of the MSc in terms of global inequality, development politics, and the changing nature of international cooperation.
A shockwave through aid
The Trump administration’s first term (2017–2020) signalled a significant break from the multilateral norms underpinning global development. In the second term, the rupture is deeper. The 2026 U.S. budget requests halving of State and International Programmes, and slashes humanitarian aid.
Programmes for global health, climate, and family planning have been reduced or eliminated and there will be a new “America First Opportunity Fund.” As one of the largest donors globally, the United States’ shift sends a shockwave through the development system—not just in financial terms, but in its ideological orientation.
The issue is not only about money. Development cooperation has long been a vehicle for promoting multilateralism, human rights, sustainability, and inclusion. What Trump’s second presidency represents is a bid to replace those norms with a nationalist, transactional logic.
The end of the post-Cold War consensus?
This moment reflects a deeper historical shift. Since the end of the Cold War, development cooperation has been guided by what some call a “consensus of consent”: a multilateral architecture anchored in institutions like the UN, the UN SDGs. That consensus is now fracturing. This new doctrine marks a departure from aid as global public good toward aid as geopolitical leverage. It is part of a broader “Washington Dissensus”: a rejection of the liberal order that once underpinned development cooperation.
Fragmentation and realignment
Yet the U.S. is not acting in isolation. Across Europe, populist parties have gained ground, and even centrist governments have begun recalibrating aid priorities in light of domestic political pressures.
As students learn in the International Development MSc programme, development cooperation is shaped not only by ideals but by competing interests, shifting alliances, and institutional power struggles. In this context, the future may not be defined by collapse of aid but by fragmentation into new ‘varieties’ of aid—some aligned with internationalism, others with nationalism; some focused on traditional goals like poverty reduction, others pivoting to border control. In this context, South–South cooperation may gain greater space.
Why this matters
Studying international development today means grappling with these uncertainties. In our MSc, students engage with the big questions: What happens when development cooperation becomes a battleground for geopolitical ideology? Can global norms such as climate action, gender equality, and multilateral governance survive? What institutional innovations—new alliances, financing mechanisms, or coalitions of the willing—might sustain cooperation?
Through modules such as The Political Economy of Development and Foundations of Development Theory and Management, you’ll be introduced to competing lenses on development: from ‘soft power’ and legitimacy to ‘norm-setting’. You’ll examine past and present examples of aid as a tool of diplomacy, containment, solidarity, and control. And you’ll gain the analytical skills to understand how new power configurations that shape development cooperation.
Development cooperation: Down but not out
So, will development cooperation survive? Yes—but in altered form. What we are witnessing is not simply a retrenchment but a redefinition of the field. Multilateralism may weaken, but new alliances may emerge. Traditional donors may falter, but new actors may rise. The key challenge is to understand the strategic, normative, and institutional dynamics behind these shifts—and to ask what kind of development cooperation should emerge.
The online International Development MSc at King’s College London provides the space, tools, and critical perspectives to explore precisely these questions. If you want to study development not just as practice, but as global politics and normative struggle, this is the programme for you:
