Aid is at a historical crossroads. At no other point since the inception of the current global aid regime has it faced such an existential crisis. The polycrisis has fuelled this. Rich countries are slashing budgets and using much of what is left to serve their own interests. There is also a crisis of legitimacy. ODA is perceived at best as being paternalistic and at worst an instrument for former colonisers to maintain their influence. The DAC has failed to address this legitimacy crisis, with its narrow membership and very concerning decisions on what countries can count as ODA.

Last week the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC), – the group of rich  countries that monitor and report on their own aid commitments – met with civil society in Paris for their annual dialogue. Top of the agenda was the DAC review which includes an internal evaluation of its own governance structures and ways of working - which immediately opens up questions about how this will make any real difference. While a plan is still to be formulated, the DAC repeatedly insisted that it would become more inclusive.  

Can the club of wealthy countries really open its doors? 

Civil society has been critical of the DAC for a long time as a space where countries from the Global South have no say in discussions. Together with an ever-changing definition of official development assistance (ODA), and increasingly creative accounting methods to define what it is, the DAC is trying to reposition itself. 

Recently, a growing global movement of CSOs have been demanding a complete change in the governance of aid - calling for it to be moved to the UN -  a space where everyone has a seat at the table. It was at the UN’s Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in Spain in July where these demands culminated in the Compromiso de Sevilla, an outcome document listing the international community’s commitments. The document falls short of calling for a real change in the governance of ODA, but it includes a reference to a ‘revitalized Development Cooperation Forum’, which should be made concrete. The DAC’s own offer also made its way to the final Compromiso de Sevilla, with an ‘invitation’ to the DAC to ‘provide updates to [UN] Member States’. 

During last week’s meetings, civil society continued to question whether  the DAC is willing and able to take the necessary steps to meet the ambition to be more inclusive. It was argued that DAC Members should demonstrate their commitment to the Framework for this Dialogue with Civil Society, which was created in 2018,  by ensuring that CSOs, particularly from the Global South, can be present and are able to effectively engage with the review process (and beyond) in a sustained manner. 

ODA needs to measure ‘donor (budgetary) effort’

The DAC’s working party on statistics (WP-Stat) invited civil society to their data forum, which followed after the DAC CSO dialogue. The WP-Stat has been both the driver and custodian of increasingly creative accounting. ODA continues to include aid that rich countries are only paying to themselves, for services such as hosting refugees. This means that aid is being inflated and therefore it undermines the credibility of the ODA statistics. Concord’s 2025 AidWatch report shows that in 2024 inflated ODA accounted for 21 per cent of the ODA reported. Civil society experts are deeply concerned that inflated aid might increase, due to inconsistencies between countries in how many of these expenses are accounted for, and recent changes in what counts as ODA that do not follow the concessionality criteria. A recent addition is private sector instruments, which are non-concessional vehicles like loans, guarantees and equity aimed to mobilise private capital, despite having questionable or unclear development impacts. 

The use of ODA to meet rich countries’ interests has become more explicit in discussions in recent years and the tone and political climate has shifted dramatically. This has been accompanied by shocking aid cuts that have had seismic effects on the aid landscape and on countries on the ground, and there are many more to come. The closure of USAID at the beginning of the year meant the loss of the world’s largest source of ODA. The OECD additionally predicts a drop in net ODA of up to 17 per cent for 2025, compared to the previous year. The discussions in Paris have made clear that the scramble for what is left of ODA has begun. 

The quality of aid is deteriorating, but who can hold rich countries accountable?

While the WP Stat last week focused on the question of how to count ODA for locally-led development, it became clear that rich countries continue to struggle to untie their aid from their own national interests and continue to largely not use country systems. Using a country’s own institutions and systems, like public financial management, procurement, and accounting systems, instead of using separate parallel systems, is a key principle of the aid effectiveness agenda. 

Twenty years on from the Paris declaration on aid effectiveness, the quality of aid has been deteriorating with no way of holding rich countries accountable. Even a more than decade-long ODA modernisation process carried out by the DAC seems to have done more harm than good, with the definition of ODA continuously being broadened. This disregard for internationally agreed standards does not give any indication that the international community can rely on the OECD-DAC to implement and safeguard its agreements.

What next? 

The recently launched DAC review process is moving fast. The DAC will present its first progress report in November and more updates will be presented in an upcoming conference in Paris in February 2026, under the French G7 presidency. The UN Financing for Development Forum in April 2026 in New York will also be a major milestone in this process. 

For us it is clear that this review would not have been possible without civil society's campaign for democratising the governance of aid in the lead-up to FfD4. We will continue advocating for that. One thing that should not be forgotten in all of this is that the needs of the world's poorest countries must be the central consideration. ODA needs to be used effectively for what it was intended  -  namely poverty eradication and fighting inequalities, in alignment with local and national needs. There is no clear sign yet that the OECD DAC is fit for this role any longer.