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I read David McNair’s article, calling for “imagination to update the purposes, structures, and systems of outmoded institutions to make them fit for today’s world”, with much interest. In fact, I sat with this article for several days. By the end, I was inspired to write these thoughts as I continue to reflect on them.
The institutional imagination of global development
David McNair’s argument lands in a moment that clarifies the architecture of global development: finance shrinks, institutions wobble, and a familiar language of renewal returns. He frames the present as an “inflexion point” and locates the central blockage in imagination: purposes, structures, and systems designed for a postwar world now strain under geopolitical fragmentation and technological acceleration. That diagnosis carries a distinctly North Atlantic institutional worldview: the world as a manageable system of rules, mandates, balance sheets, and incentives, guided by better design and smarter coordination. The text sits inside the Carnegie tradition of global order: a faith in repair through architecture, an assumption that legitimacy follows technical competence, and a belief that development progresses through improved multilateral machinery.
A Global South reading begins from a different starting point: development as a lived encounter with power, extraction, and discipline, experienced through prices, borders, debt, land tenure, policing, licensing, procurement, and whose suffering counts as urgent. Institutions appear as social forces that shape who becomes visible, who becomes investable, who becomes punishable, and who becomes a footnote in a “portfolio”.
Development lives as an everyday negotiation with systems that rarely announce themselves as development.
Imagination matters, and power determines whose imagination becomes policy. Africa and the wider Global South produce theory precisely because daily life forces constant theorising: how to govern when formal systems arrive late, how to trade when borders tax survival, how to build legitimacy when the state performs through coercion and scarcity, how to raise children when inflation cancels wages, how to plan when climate and currency swing in the same week. This is political economy as lived method.
Progress, Metrics, and the Cost of Abstraction
McNair’s evidence for the “golden age” of progress leans heavily on global health metrics and poverty trends. Those achievements carry weight. AIDS-related deaths fell sharply from the mid-2000s peak, driven by treatment access and prevention. Gavi reports over a billion children reached and millions of deaths averted through immunisation support. The Global Fund reports tens of millions of lives saved across AIDS, TB, and malaria. Under the World Bank’s most recent methodological revisions using 2021 PPPs, approximately 10.5 per cent of the global population lived in extreme poverty in 2022, a higher baseline than earlier estimates suggested. These figures carry real human meaning across Kenya’s clinics, Nigeria’s community health networks, India’s ASHA workers, Brazil’s public health system, and South Africa’s treatment activism.
A Global South critique treats these gains as part of a more complex story of value extraction, labour discipline, and geopolitical bargaining. Health progress sits alongside commodity dependence, illicit financial flows, tax base erosion, and wage repression within global value chains. The same decades that expanded access to antiretrovirals also expanded austerity as a doctrine across the South, hardened intellectual property regimes, and consolidated platform power in the digital economy. “Progress” becomes a contested category: progress for survival, progress for sovereignty, progress for dignity, progress for bargaining power. A child surviving a vaccine-preventable disease matters, and a state losing policy autonomy through debt conditionality also matters. Development lives in the seam between these truths.
Aid Withdrawal and the Reality of External Volatility
McNair’s narrative of disruption highlights the dismantling of USAID and a broader retreat from multilateral commitments. This point deserves precision, because it reveals how quickly Northern domestic politics can redraw Southern life chances. Reporting in 2025 described a sweeping termination of USAID programmes and a transfer of remaining functions into the US State Department, framed as a reorientation of foreign assistance. The effect reaches beyond budget lines: it reorganises medical supply chains, reshapes civil society funding ecosystems, and shifts bargaining power in fragile contexts. The “aid system” appears as a strategic instrument, and communities experience it as a sudden collapse of services, a scramble for substitutes, and a reminder that external benevolence tracks domestic votes elsewhere.
The Global South has learned to interpret donor volatility as a structural condition rather than an exception.
That reality pushes the Global South towards a deeper premise: development institutions function as geopolitical infrastructure. McNair acknowledges a return to interests and “instrumentalisation of aid”. The South has long treated aid as interest-bearing power, including in the Cold War, structural adjustment, and the post-9/11 securitisation of assistance. The difference lies in candour. Northern policy now speaks transactionally in public; the South has always negotiated transactionally in private. This shift creates an opening: a more honest diplomacy where the South brings its own transactional intelligence and sets its own terms with explicit metrics of sovereignty, capability, and social legitimacy.
Legibility as Power
McNair classifies critiques of development into three clusters: geopolitical repositioning, dignity and accountability, and efficiency and impact. Each category maps to lived experiences and also conceals a deeper engine: legibility. Development systems demand legible states, legible budgets, legible beneficiaries, legible project cycles, legible procurement, legible indicators, legible “results”. Legibility serves coordination, and legibility also serves control. When Malawi hosts hundreds of projects and thousands of donor activities, the managerial burden becomes a governance reality, and the deeper consequence becomes political: ministerial calendars fill with donor reporting, policy attention bends towards what can be counted, and citizenship becomes a spectator sport around externally funded priorities.
Legibility also shapes dignity. McNair asks who accountability serves: donor taxpayers, recipient citizens, intermediaries. A Global South frame treats accountability as sovereignty in practice: citizens must hold their state accountable, and the state must hold external partners accountable, and both require bargaining power. Aid that routes through foreign contractors tends to route power away from local publics. McNair notes localisation gaps, citing claims around direct funding shares. USAID’s own localisation reporting for FY2024 shows that direct funding to local partners accounts for 12.1% of certain categories, which still leaves the central pattern intact: external architectures retain steering authority.
Efficiency debates often miss the Global South’s core question: efficient for whom and toward what political end? An impeccably evaluated project can still weaken state capacity by building parallel systems. A streamlined multilateral mandate can still legitimise extractive global rules. UN reform conversations cite a vast mandate landscape and heavy process costs, and those numbers matter for institutional performance. They also risk distracting from the deeper struggle: global governance carries rules about trade, taxation, intellectual property, debt workouts, and capital mobility that determine Southern fiscal space far more powerfully than any project pipeline.
Remittances, Migration, and the People’s Welfare State
McNair invokes remittances as a larger flow than aid, marking the shifting scale of global finance. The World Bank projects remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries at about $685 billion in 2024. The scale matters, and the meaning matters more: remittances represent a people-funded welfare state, financed through migration, family obligation, and transnational sacrifice. They also represent a global labour market that extracts care, construction, and service labour from the South while exporting risk back to families. Remittances carry survival, schooling, and enterprise capital; they also carry the political story of borders as economic policy.
A development imagination that treats remittances merely as “flows” misses their nature as a social contract built across distance.
ODA numbers require equal precision. OECD reporting projects a significant drop in ODA in 2025, in the range of 9–17%, following earlier declines, with especially sharp potential falls for least developed countries and sub-Saharan Africa. This matters because volatility harms planning, and volatility also reveals hierarchy: fiscal stress in rich states becomes immediate austerity in poor states. The Global South has learned to interpret donor volatility as a structural condition, and it has built complex survival strategies around it: diversified partnerships, informal provision, religious and kinship safety nets, and fast adaptation in municipal economies.
Instruments, Elites, and the Politics Inside Technical Solutions
McNair’s recommendations include targeting concessional finance to fragile and low-income contexts, and shifting middle-income engagement toward debt relief tools, MDB balance-sheet leverage, swaps, and “country platforms”. This menu reflects a technocratic belief: better instruments unlock better outcomes. The South’s critique focuses on the political content inside the instruments. Debt relief tools carry governance through creditor power, rating agencies, disclosure regimes, and legal jurisdictions. MDB leverage carries conditionality through standards, procurement, and macro-fiscal constraints. “Country platforms” carry a theory of the state that privileges central planning by elite bargains, and Stefan Dercon’s “elite commitment” framing fits within that tradition.
Elites, coalitions, and post-colonial statecraft
An African political economy reading asks a sharper question: which elites, committed to which development, accountable to which publics, sustained by which material coalition. Post-independence statecraft across Africa produced varied answers: some built national projects through industrial policy and education expansion; others reproduced colonial extraction logics with local managers. Structural adjustment reconfigured the state toward austerity, privatisation, and weakened public bargaining with capital. Informal economies expanded as a rational response, forming thick markets of trust, credit, and mutual surveillance. These systems carry intelligence: rotating savings groups, trader associations, boda-boda networks, church-based welfare, neighbourhood security arrangements, and digital hustles that arbitrage platform rules. Development policy that frames informality as a temporary deviation misses the sophistication of these governance forms.
African Theories of Infrastructure and Scale
Kenya offers a clear illustration. Mobile money scaled through everyday trust, agent networks, and social need, then rewired payments, savings, and micro-enterprise behaviour. The innovation emerged through a lived economy of small transactions and relational credit, and then it became national infrastructure through regulation, competition, and consumer habit. This trajectory carries a theory: African infrastructure often scales through distributed human networks first, and formal systems consolidate later. A development institution built around centralised procurement and five-year plans struggles to recognise this dynamic. It also struggles to fund it, because distributed networks resist neat logframes.
Cultural production and legitimacy
Nigeria’s creative industries offer another theory. Nollywood grew through informal distribution, rapid production cycles, and an audience-driven market logic. It built soft power, jobs, and transnational identity through formats outsiders often dismissed as low-budget. The lesson sits in governance: legitimacy flows from audience recognition and market ritual as much as from formal accreditation. That principle travels into civic organising, where movements build authority through shared suffering, mutual aid, and visible courage, and where legitimacy frequently outperforms official hierarchy.
Digital public infrastructure and sovereignty
India’s digital public infrastructure shows a further dimension: state capability can shape markets through platforms that lower transaction costs and enable inclusion at scale, including UPI as a payment rail. The political economy lesson carries global relevance: infrastructure design shapes market structure, and sovereignty in the digital era includes owning rails, setting standards, and governing data. Africa’s digital future sits inside the same stakes, especially as global platforms capture data value and shape labour through algorithmic management.
Brazil’s social protection history, including Bolsa Família and broader welfare innovations, offers a lesson on legitimacy: cash transfers become governance tools that bind citizens and state through predictable support and measurable outcomes. The South African grant system similarly demonstrates how social policy becomes a stabilising force in a highly unequal society. These cases show a distinct imagination: development as a political settlement expressed through recurrent transfers, public services, and negotiated redistribution, rather than a projectised set of interventions.
Freedom, Time, and Sovereignty
McNair’s frame leans on “development as freedom” via Amartya Sen and on the postwar architecture of Bretton Woods. This lineage carries moral strength and a particular history of who designed the rules and who later entered. The South’s theoretical contribution lies in expanding the category of freedom to include freedom from extractive dependence, freedom from currency fragility, freedom from debt traps governed in foreign courts, freedom from data capture, freedom from trade rules that suppress industrial upgrading, and freedom to build regional markets on African terms. Freedom includes time: the time to plan beyond election cycles, the time to nurture domestic firms, the time to build capable bureaucracies, the time to make mistakes and learn.
Imagination, power, and rule-making
That raises a core challenge for McNair’s imagination thesis. Imagination carries force when it reshapes power relationships. Imagination that remains inside existing shareholder structures, rating agency regimes, and creditor hierarchies becomes managerial creativity. The South requires an imagination that changes who sets the rules and who captures value. This ambition connects directly to illicit financial flows and tax justice. McNair cites estimates of Africa losing $88.6 billion annually to illicit financial flows.
The specific figure varies across studies and methodologies, and the underlying truth persists: capital flight, profit shifting, trade misinvoicing, and corrupt outflows drain fiscal capacity across the continent. An imagination that focuses on “aligning platforms” while leaving leakage untouched offers limited transformation.
A sharper Global South agenda treats domestic resource mobilisation as a political project anchored in legitimacy. Tax compliance grows through trust, visible services, and fair enforcement. Kenya’s revenue debates illustrate the tension: citizens demand value for money, and the state often delivers coercive collection with weak service reciprocity. Fiscal contracts require visible competence and credible restraint. That means procurement reform that citizens can see, land governance that defuses speculation, policing that respects dignity, and service delivery that reaches informal settlements and rural margins.
Debt as lived political economy
Debt deserves equal attention as a lived system. Eurobond borrowing across African states created rapid fiscal space, then high global rates and currency depreciation turned servicing into a budgetary choke point. Debt restructurings remain slow, creditor coordination remains complex, and rating agencies shape borrowing costs through frameworks that frequently undervalue developmental investment and overvalue short-term fiscal compression. A South-centred imagination treats debt workouts as development infrastructure: clear standstill mechanisms, transparent creditor registries, and legal reforms that reduce holdout power. OECD projections about ODA declines amplify the urgency: volatile concessional flows plus expensive commercial debt equals compressed policy autonomy.
McNair points to debt-for-development swaps and notes a market slowdown. Swaps carry promise and constraints: they often focus on environment-linked outcomes chosen by external actors, impose complex monitoring burdens, and create narrow earmarks that bypass domestic democratic prioritisation. The South’s imagination pushes swaps toward citizen-chosen priorities: school feeding, primary healthcare staffing, municipal sanitation, and community-designed local climate adaptation. That requires a governance innovation: participatory earmarking with public reporting that citizens use, audited through institutions trusted locally.
The question of fragile states in McNair’s recommendations brings the deepest political economy stakes. Targeting ODA to fragile contexts aligns with humanitarian urgency and donor security rationales. It also risks entrenching a model where fragility becomes a funding category that sustains external management and weak domestic accountability. The South’s theory treats fragility as a political settlement problem shaped by borders, resource rents, regional proxy wars, and youth exclusion from economic opportunity. Security-first aid frames can stabilise regimes and deepen citizen alienation. A citizen-centred approach invests in legitimacy infrastructure: local justice systems, community safety, livelihood pathways, and civic information ecosystems that reduce manipulation.
Data, technology, and power
Information ecosystems now form a frontline. Development debates often treat technology as acceleration; Africans live technology as infrastructure plus surveillance plus opportunity. Digital labour platforms recruit youth into precarious piecework; data brokers extract behavioural traces; political campaigns deploy microtargeting; and citizens organise through encrypted groups and informal media. A Global South imagination treats data as a factor of production and a domain of sovereignty. That means national and regional data governance that sets clear rights, enforces interoperability, and demands local value capture. It means public digital infrastructure built on open standards where feasible, with procurement rules that prevent lock-in. It means a civic tech ecosystem that strengthens citizen oversight: budget tracking, service scorecards, grievance systems, and collective bargaining for platform workers.
Energy, industry, and African futures
McNair’s text gestures toward “Mission 300” as an outcome-oriented model for electrification. Energy access remains central, and Africa’s energy story sits inside land rights, transmission politics, tariff structures, and local manufacturing. Electrification becomes development when it powers enterprise, cold chains, irrigation, clinics, and learning. It becomes dependence when it imports equipment entirely, locks maintenance into foreign supply chains, and prices power beyond household capacity. A South-centred imagination pairs electrification with industrial policy: local assembly, skills pipelines, regional supply chains, and procurement that rewards domestic capability growth. It also treats mini-grids and distributed generation as governance innovations that fit settlement patterns and reduce transmission losses.
Three levers for a new development era
This returns to McNair’s central claim about imagination. The South agrees on imagination and locates its centre of gravity in sovereignty, legitimacy, and value capture. The institutional update agenda becomes compelling when it shifts three levers at once.
- First: the lever of rule-making. Global tax coordination, debt restructuring mechanisms, and trade rules determine developmental capacity. OECD data provides clarity on ODA volatility; that clarity should accompany a stronger global bargain on tax and debt, anchored in enforceable commitments and transparent registries.
- Second: the lever of infrastructure ownership. Remittances at $685 billion show the scale of citizen finance. That scale can capitalise domestic development banks, pension funds, and municipal bonds when governance earns trust. African Finance Corporation discussions around domestic savings point to this potential, and the political challenge remains: building investment vehicles that citizens experience as safe, useful, and nationally beneficial.
- Third: the lever of legitimacy. Development systems succeed where citizens believe the state serves them, where taxation feels reciprocal, where corruption carries consequences, and where public services create everyday dignity. Institutions that treat legitimacy as an outcome measure, tracked through citizen experience and verified through open data, become more effective than institutions that treat legitimacy as branding.
Development as the reorganisation of relationships
The Global North often asks which institutions to preserve and which to replace. The Global South asks a more concrete question: which relationships get reorganised when an institution acts. Every dollar carries a relationship: between citizen and state, between state and creditor, between worker and platform, between farmer and market, between community and land, between country and global rule-setter. Development becomes the craft of shaping those relationships toward shared prosperity and political dignity.
A forward proposition emerges from this reading. The next development era grows through a South-led covenant that treats finance as one ingredient inside a larger governance recipe: regional markets that reward African production, debt regimes that protect fiscal space, data governance that captures value locally, social protection that stabilises households, and civic information systems that make governments answerable in real time. USAID’s dismantling and ODA volatility clarify the lesson: external assurance carries fragility as a built-in feature.
A development imagination worthy of Africa builds durable autonomy through legitimacy, regional power, and citizen-centred infrastructure, and it invites the Global North into partnership through fair rules, shared accountability, and explicit respect for the South as a maker of theory and a designer of the future.
