The End of Development?

With world leaders descending on New York City to attend the U.N. General Assembly, FP’s new print issue advances a provocation: Is it the end of development as we know it? With the United States pulling out of the Paris climate agreement and denouncing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, FP economics columnist Adam Tooze argues in his cover essay that development was always more about power than values. Maybe our hopes about a global development agenda were “the final gasp of a unipolar, end-of-history fantasy,” he writes.

In this light, is U.S. President Donald Trump’s hollowing out of the U.S. Agency for International Development merely a symptom, not a cause, of the changing world order? Can China fill the gap? How will changing aid goals shift soft power? Join FP’s Ravi Agrawal for a live discussion with Tooze.