By Samantha Igo From April 21-26, 2025, all eyes in the global economic governance space will turn to Washington, DC as the 2025 International Monetary Fund (IMF)/World Bank Spring Meetings kick-off amid a rapid-fire news cycle, tumultuous geopolitical environment and ongoing calls for structural reform to the international financial architecture. While expectations for meaningful progress […]
The current international financial architecture is misaligned with the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. External financing flows to emerging market and developing economies, excluding China, need to increase by at least $1 trillion annually by 2030, but the highest level in the past decade was roughly one-third of what is […]
In the 2024 United Nations Pact for the Future, global leaders committed to scaling up and reforming international financial institutions to make them fit to meet the global challenges of the 21st century. Moving forward, there are two vital opportunities for the global community to revive global efforts to address these urgent challenges: the Fourth […]
By Chiara Mariotti and Richard Kozul-Wright 2025 will be a pivotal year for development and climate cooperation, with financial matters coming to the fore at a range of key policy events, from the upcoming Finance in Common Summit taking place at the end of February in Cape Town to the 30th United Nations Climate Change […]
International financing for development has persistently fallen short of developing country needs. That gap has widened dramatically with the onset of the climate crisis, where the costs of climate inaction far outweigh the financing needed in developing countries to catalyze low-carbon, socially inclusive and resilient growth trajectories and adapt to climate-related shocks that are already […]
By Tim Hirschel-Burns In late June, the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) will take place in Seville, Spain. Despite challenging geopolitical circumstances, the conference – which is the first in 10 years and almost certainly the last FfD before the critical 2030 milestone – will still play a key normative role as […]
By Tim Hirschel-Burns 2025 admittedly presents a dubious landscape for achieving substantive global economic governance reforms. The scale of needs is large—achieving development and climate goals demands trillions more in annual financing and a reorientation of our economic system—while our political context is trending in the wrong direction, with countries cutting international investments and geopolitical […]
By Tim Hirschel-Burns and Rishikesh Ram Bhandary A $4 trillion financing gap to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 85 percent of which are off track. A need to rapidly scale up climate action and energy access. Weak global growth. Instability-fueled migration. A reversal in a decades-long trend of reducing global poverty. The […]
By Tim Hirschel-Burns The 29th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29), taking place from November 11-29, 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan, has been dubbed the “Finance COP” and is expected to deliver a new climate finance goal, known in COP jargon as the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG). This NCQG will succeed the climate finance goal […]
By Maureen Heydt The global community is running out of time and falling behind on financing shared climate and development goals, with the United Nations warning that 85 percent of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are either off track, stagnant or regressing. Likewise, efforts to limit a global temperature increase to 1.5C consistent with […]