In association with the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office
Executive summary
This report records the Wilton Park dialogue on reimagining international development cooperation in a world of multiplying shocks and shifting power. The current global development architecture was built for an earlier era, yet cooperation remains essential as climate and nature crises, debt distress, conflict, migration and technological disruption increasingly intersect. The discussion was convened as a milestone on the road to the UK co-hosted international development conference planned for Spring 2026, intended to create the foundations for a modern compact – an agreement on principles that will define how a wider group of stakeholders cooperates internationally to address these issues- and the coalitions needed to deliver it.
The dialogue brought together a deliberately diverse group: governments and multilaterals, members of civil society from the Global North and South, philanthropy, private sector and technology companies, think tanks, and representatives from youth networks. The goal was to take stock of the current context and its challenges, test assumptions, surface what is changing, and identify where a broader and more diverse set of stakeholders can better work together through a system of international cooperation. The emphasis was on identifying current development challenges and opportunities, and more effective approaches to meeting them – including practical partnership, mutual responsibility and plural leadership – rather than on aid volumes or institutional preservation.
Participants worked through a set of questions: What is development for in this context, and what future are we currently building? If the donor–recipient model is past its peak, how should cooperation work instead, and how do we build trust and accountability when incentives and timelines differ? What forms of partnership are proving effective, what principles should guide a new compact, and how should those principles be used, governed and monitored? Finally, which outcomes could a UK co-hosted conference most credibly accelerate by convening the right actors and demonstrating how these principles- in the form of a compact- could be put into practice?
While views differed on emphasis, a broad consensus emerged. Cooperation should move beyond the aid paradigm to outcome-focused, co-created partnerships that strengthen national and local systems and ownership. Participants agreed on centring people and locally-led delivery, including through recognising that there is a social compact between citizens and governments to drive development. For example, if taxes are collected, services must be delivered; if money is spent by ‘donor’ countries or private organisations, there must be domestic returns or other dividends, as well as international ones.
Key to future partnerships is being honest about differing power and incentives, and embedding mutual accountability and transparency. There was strong support for using all levers in partnership policy, trade, investment, technology and data and knowledge, using concessional finance sparingly where it is most critical, and shaping markets to scale proven solutions. The group recognised the need for agility in frontier markets and fragile states, and for planned transitions to domestic financing and capability. In short, the direction of travel is a practical, plural leadership model that aligns mutual interest with solidarity and measurable results.
The principles of international cooperation that resulted from the conference will now be tested with wider groups of stakeholders.