Change is heralded everywhere: in the global political and strategic environment and the transformation of the global and regional balance of power, in the institutional structure, in the regional and global alliances, in goods and services, in the nature of labor, etc. It is therefore fascinating to take the unusual route of asking what does not change, what is “permanent”, and to ask whether there are strongholds on which to base our thinking about the future. This is obviously a huge subject, one that should mobilize the best philosophers …

Contribution to an opinion piece  “In my view” in the  Development Cooperation Report 2016. The Sustainable Development Goals as Business Opportunities  of the OECD (chapter 4, “Measuring private finance mobilized for sustainable development“).
The increasing scarcity of public budgets has naturally led to heightened expectations about private financing for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As such, this is quite a challenge: public and private objectives do not coincide naturally and private firms are not philanthropic, even though some individuals within them may be.

Re-defining ODA should not be seen as an arcane and primarily technical subject. It addresses the fundamentals of aid effectiveness as well as the role that governments can be expected to play. In our increasingly complex societies, public action, both national and international, should be mainly thought of in terms of incentivizing and coordinating behaviors. However, most aid “architecture” and practice is based on donors actually financing visible outputs, whether goods or services. At a time when the notion of “shared value” prompts us to revisit the concept of public-private partnerships, modernizing the definition of ODA can herald a sea-change in development effectiveness.