Dan Banik speaks with David McNair about the shifting politics of global development in an era of debt distress and declining humanitarian funding. They explore how activism must adapt to a changing global financial landscape, the rise of agency in the Global South, and what it will take to reform development finance for the years ahead.
In this episode of In Pursuit of Development, Dan Banik is joined by Dr. David McNair, Executive Director of ONE.org, for a conversation on the future of activism and global development in an age of overlapping crises. At a time when debt distress is rising, humanitarian funding is falling, and trust in multilateral institutions is under strain, what does effective advocacy look like?Â
Drawing on two decades of campaigning to reduce child mortality, unlock billions for climate and sustainable development, and reform elements of the global financial architecture, McNair reflects on what has worked in the past and why some of those strategies may no longer be sufficient. The discussion explores the politics of solidarity, the rise of agency in the Global South, the cost of capital facing African economies, and the growing calls to modernize global financial governance.Â
[Dan Banik]
David, it's been a while since we've been trying to get you on the show.
I'm happy to see you today. Welcome.
[David McNair]
Thank you.
It's a real privilege to be here.
And yeah, thank you for having me.
[Dan Banik]
How do you see the role of activism in promoting global development amidst a lot of this doom and gloom that we keep hearing about?
What does it mean to be an activist promoting poverty reduction, you know, working towards better health security?
Give us your take on this.
[David McNair]
It's a really tough time.
And if you think about the first quarter of the century, we've been living through an age of miracles.
I mean, everyone knows the stats: in 2001 one in four people lived in extreme poverty, you know, it's one in 10. Child deaths declined by 70%. And, you know, 65 million lives saved through the Global Fund.
And in a sense, so much of that was enabled by a permissible policy environment in which leaders supported multilateralism, you know, China joined the World Trade Organization.
And that, I think, has fundamentally changed.
A lot of the debate, I think, in our sector sees that as a sign of failure, that we haven't kind of caught up with the trends and so on.
There is another way of looking at it, which is that it is a sign of success in that prosperity has spread around the world.
And that is now creating kind of tensions because the middle class in advanced economies have lost out.
But poor people living in other parts of the world have gained massively.
It's not gone far enough, of course, but we have lived through this era where the kind of permissible environment for cooperation, for aid, for development has led to major outcomes.
So I think we shouldn't forget that when we kind of hear the kind of doom and gloom messages.
Yes, that tide is turning.
And yes, the political picture is, you know, quite bleak, particularly in Europe and North America.
But go to other parts of the world and that's not the case.
I mean, I just came back from Johannesburg where I was there for the G20 summit.
And it was fascinating reading the news reports, you know, international news.
It was all about the US not turning up and like all these tensions and so on.
In the conversation in Johannesburg, Donald Trump was barely mentioned.
It was about, you know, we've got these challenges.
Here's how we kind of rack and stack the contributing factors to the challenges.
And here's how we solve them.
And there are things we can do on our own.
There are things that we can do with partners, and that might be with the traditional development actors.
It might be with the Middle East. It might be with Asia.
But we need to take things into our own hands. And I think that's potentially a kind of a sign of hope in that there is a kind of emerging generation.
And the demographics are really clear in the African continent particularly that are saying, you know, we can't rely on other people to solve our problems.
Let's identify them, figure out the solutions and innovate in ways that will solve that.
Now, that doesn't negate the fact that there are major challenges when it comes to tariffs, when it comes to conflict, when it comes to a lack of resources, particularly for low income countries that just don't have access to other forms of finance.
And we need to work on that.
But to come back to your question about activism, I really believe that policy is downstream from politics.
Politics is downstream from culture, and culture is not a kind of defined thing that is not shapeable.
It is something that we can invest in, that we can support thought leaders who will kind of change and shape the environment.
And I'm somewhat obsessed by the Mont Pelerin Society.
I don't know if you've ever come across this, but it was created by Hayek in 1947.
And they met in Mont Pelerin, which is a little village off the shores of Lake Geneva.
And their ideology at the time was that they were worried about the overreach of the state post World War II.
And so they put together a group, relatively small group of thought leaders who had a 20-year plan to embed the ideas of neoliberalism, which at the time were extremely radical.
And they had a concerted plan to bring those radical ideas into the center.
And in the 70s, whenever the oil price crisis happened, the pump was primed because of the work that they had done over 20 years for Thatcher and Reagan to come in and build a whole policy agenda around a worldview that they had shaped.
And I think we need to be thinking about that once again, because the fact that we've seen so much progress means that people like me, people in the kind of activist field, have almost taken our eye off the ball in terms of those upstream issues that are fundamental to giving us the political license to do the technical, sectoral, siloed work that we've all been focused on.
And we need to go back upstream and shape the culture and the politics in a way which will lead to the long-term outcomes and the sustaining of those outcomes that we need to see.
[Dan Banik]
I like the fact that you highlight the successes, and that's been a very important part of my work in the last decade or so to talk about what works, not just the doom and gloom.
And I've always tried to balance the picture.
When you talk about what works often and the successes, and I know you've worked extensively on reducing child mortality and highlighting grand corruption and how to combat that and tax evasion.
The thing is that when one talks about what works and the successes, a lot of people point out, but if you talk too much about what works, then you gloss over all the challenges.
And my argument has always been, no, no, no, we need to balance the picture.
We can't just have a one-sided focus on doom and gloom.
We should also highlight some of the successes.
Otherwise, it just doesn't give hope.
But from an activist perspective, David, I mean, you always need something to campaign against, right?
You want something to fight for.
And I suppose there may sometimes be a tendency to not talk so much about the successes because you want to focus on those huge challenges.
And we still have poverty around the world, extreme poverty.
We still have an energy security problem on the African continent.
We still have a lack of economic growth.
Afrobarometer studies on the continent keep highlighting that it's jobs, jobs, and jobs.
We have a debt crisis.
So we have all of these things.
Sometimes when you have success, maybe one thinks differently as an activist.
One thinks about where's the next problem going to be?
Or maybe that you feel that you won't get funding because people say, hey, come on, you know, there's so much more going on.
You mentioned, the middle class in our parts of the world that is more frustrated now.
Because they feel that, oh, there's been too much outsourcing, we are having unemployment.
So why are we going to show solidarity and why should we give money to charities and NGOs when we have a health queue and the NHS needs funding?
So do you feel that solidarity, the idea of solidarity is changing?
That people have less to offer others?
Have we become more selfish?
That is certainly what a lot of people say we have since 2016 in the UK and also in the US.
[David McNair]
I mean, in a sense, the permissible policy environment that we saw, you know, in the first part of the century, you know, the kind of like Blair-Obama era.
In part, what we did was to say, let's find centrist leaders that want to do the right thing and give them the ideas and the political cover to be able to do that.
And there was a vocal minority that championed that.
And then a majority that was, in a sense, giving permission, but was never going to champion these issues.
And in a sense, that vocal minority, which used to fight for debt relief and AIDS and so on, has been replaced in some respects by a vocal minority that is fighting for ethno-nationalism, protect what's at home.
And that's a very compelling message.
And I think part of the challenge is that we've seen a collapse of trust in institutions.
And if you look at the polling, Rockefeller did a poll in September and then recently updated it.
And it showed massive support for multilateral cooperation, fighting climate change.
But when you ask those same people about their belief in the institutions to be able to deliver impact, they just don't believe that the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the development NGOs are going to deliver.
[Dan Banik]
That's because they've been fed ideas of corruption, mismanagement, wastage.
[David McNair]
Yeah, yeah.
So I think we need to kind of, you know, there's a narrative about mismanagement that we need to proactively challenge.
And I've seen, you know, in my work, you know, our sector, they almost don't want to talk about those issues because they feel that if we do talk about it, it opens up a Pandora's box.
My argument has been that conversation is happening anyway.
And if you don't engage, you leave the whole story to people who want it.
[Dan Banik]
But it's also the credibility of the activists at stake.
If you don't talk about the failures, it can't just be one-sided success that you guys are engaging in.
These are difficult issues.
You have to fail, you know, in order to succeed.
[David McNair]
Yeah, and I think we need to tell that more nuanced story.
But the other thing is the kind of conflation of crises.
You know, Adam Tooze talked about the polycrisis a couple of years ago.
I think, you know, and the kind of doom and gloom message, which I think is very compelling for a particular subset of activists in our population.
But actually, if we want political consensus around these issues, we need to mobilize the center.
And there was a really interesting group called Kindness In that did some extensive polling in Europe and North America a few years ago.
And what they found was that group is completely turned off by doom and gloom messages because they don't see that they have any agency in it.
They might just think, well, I don't believe that, or they might believe it and then don’t think that they have any role to play.
[Dan Banik]
But it leads to this lack of hope that, you know, there's nothing that I can do to change the world, so why even try?
[David McNair]
But what they find with this group of, you know, the center politically and the center economically, which are critical for mobilizing people to support these issues, is that they wanted to protect things in their local community that they loved.
So if you ask people to take action to support their local park, their local forest, mobilize as part of a local community to do something locally that then ladders up to the international, they're very, very keen to do so.
It's when you kind of don't take that local step and you just kind of jump to, well, you know, we're going to miss 1.5 degrees and therefore this world is terrible.
What do I as a community worker in a local school, like what do I do about that?
There's no agency involved.
And I think what we need to do is help people understand like what's actually going on, who makes these decisions and where do I have agency within it?
Because that's the hopeful and empowering thing.
And then how do you build communities where you can find other people like you that work on that stuff together?
And if we don't do that kind of grassroots mobilization where the local is connected to the global, then you just lose people, I think.
[Dan Banik]
To pick up on something you said earlier about the media landscape, at least in our parts of the world, that often portrays certain world events or these high-level meetings.
It is usually focusing on one aspect, whether the US is part and parcel of it or who's pulling out, who's backing it, who wasn't there, etc.
One of the most important themes this season for my show has been to talk about the rise of the Global South.
And I've been making the argument that the G20 has become quite important, especially the last four years, given that the presidencies of the G20 have been held by Global South countries, you know, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Brazil.
And some of the ideas of development that are being promoted in these discussions and the declarations are actually interesting.
We need more attention in our parts of the world in relation to what the Global South really wants.
And I've been making the argument that we seem to differ on the idea of development.
In the Global North, we talk more about climate, emission reductions, pollution control, whatever that affects our lives.
It's not about extreme poverty.
It is not about health inequity.
But in other parts of the world, people are speaking a different language.
And some of this is coming across in the BRICS.
By the way, I thought BRICS was a dead and buried entity.
We see the resurrection of the BRICS, the G20.
Give us a little sense of what the discussions were like in Johannesburg, in Pretoria, this whole year that South Africa has been chairing the G20.
What would you highlight as the successful stories or the messaging coming out, rather than just focusing on the fact that the US did not attend?
[David McNair]
I mean, your first point about the reporting of these events speaks to a broader issue, which maybe we can come on to later, which is the shifts in the media and communication landscape and the lack of investment of news outlets in really following the detail of these things.
And therefore, you just get this top-line analysis.
But I think to your broader point, this succession of Global South G20s has been incredibly impactful.
If you look at the work that I do on development finance, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil did a lot of work on making the multilateral development bank system more effective and pushing the MDBs to better leverage their balance sheets.
And that work, which was done under these Global South presidencies, has unlocked about $400 billion in additional lending headroom — low-cost lending to support infrastructure, to support development.
So these are really practical things that, you know, their stories, because they're kind of technical, they don't get told.
But there is a lot of work that's being done behind the scenes.
So coming to your question about the South African G20.
I think that the narrative there was: we want a seat at the table, and we want to be taken seriously, and we want to address fundamental imbalances or injustices in the global economy.
And one of the principal issues that the South African presidency took up was the cost of borrowing — cost of sovereign lending, cost of capital — where they see the risk ratings that are published by credit rating agencies apportioning higher levels of risk to African economies than is necessarily appropriate because of the default rates that the data shows.
And therefore, they're paying more for their debt.
There's less fiscal space to invest, but also the likelihood of default is higher because you're paying higher rates.
So the whole idea was like: let's tackle this issue in very practical ways — looking at what data needs to be published, what domestic government reforms are needed, and where we need to look at the international agenda around how regulations are driving these high costs of capital.
But the whole principle was not that we want more finance, or we want charity, or we want reparations for past injustices.
It's like: we want a fair playing field so that we can participate.
And that's the story that's being told.
And it's really interesting how different G20 members have responded to that kind of story.
[Dan Banik]
David, I really enjoyed our chat.
Thank you so much for coming on my show today.
[David McNair]
Thank you so much for your time, Dan.
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