Richard Manning notes that despite much progress over the past half-century, great inequalities persist. While this means that international concessional flows will still be necessary for several decades to come, he argues that future aid programmes should be more responsible, accountable and transparent. Better delivery of aid also continues to be an important issue, especially for aid-dependent countries. The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) can continue to take a leading role, providing collective self-discipline. This includes, however, taking a fresh look at how official development assistance (ODA) is defined to ensure that all reported ODA is truly concessional. Broader agreement among all providers of development co-operation on how to measure development flows will also be essential. As the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) reach their due date in 2015, new targets are needed – maintaining a poverty focus while bringing in new concerns such as transport, energy, human rights and empowerment.

Because of the numerous changes in the motivations and objectives of aid policy over the past decades, Jean-Michel Severino compares official development assistance (ODA) to a Hydra. Yet while today’s global “macro-social” complexities create new ground for international solidarity, he argues that a profound reconsideration of the objectives, measurements, policy content and financing modes of development assistance is not only necessary and welcome, but also inevitable. A new generation of shared, long-term goals is needed to set the pace for collective mobilisation by reconciling social concerns with concepts of public goods and global macroeconomic management, shifting the focus from finance only to more inclusive policy approaches. Yet the challenge, he sustains, is not only to define objectives, but to measure results against them. To this end, a new international measurement system is needed. Severino foresees a gradual shift in financing of public welfare, with the rich in all countries bearing the burden of financing for the poor, for instance through international taxation.