With traditional flows of foreign aid in decline, developing economies face severe financing bottlenecks. The need for support in fostering sustainable development is projected to swiftly climb from $4.5 trillion in 2025 to $6.5 trillion by 2030, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Yet aid cuts by traditional donors from the Global North — most obviously, the United States of America but also the United Kingdom and Germany — have left a deep dent in the financing of essential sectors, including health, food security, nutrition, and climate action.
But the Global South is not without agency. Indeed, the voice of developing countries is too significant to be ignored, having coalesced in a time of charged geopolitical rivalries to counter the deeply embedded inequalities evidenced for decades in the global order. Countries such as India, China, Brazil, and South Africa are discussing partnerships based on equal footing.
In the West, these efforts are dismissed as merely talking shop, lacking tangible outcomes, or as a pretence of competition to Western-led institutions. Threats by the US president, Donald Trump, to slap extra tariffs on BRICS countries for pursuing 'anti-American policies' are telling of the quiet revolution led by the Global South.
Here, new actors, such as philanthropic organisations, are operating as levers of change under the South-South Cooperation framework. For instance, a 2025 report on Indian philanthropy revealed the modest gains achieved by India’s domestic philanthropy ecosystem, where "funding for the social sector steadily grew at the rate of 13 per cent over the past five years and is estimated to have reached INR 25 lakh crore (US$ 300 billion; 8.3 per cent of GDP) in FY 2024". Underscoring a crucial aspect of the quiet revolution, in this sense, is India’s vibrant domestic philanthropy, slowly treading the path towards sustainable development.
Another aspect relates to the emerging dynamics among connectivity, partnerships and global environmental governance that are pivotal for a majority of the Global South countries. Future-proofing supply chains via feasible connectivity corridors to access critical resources has become a universal priority. India’s optimism with the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor is a pertinent example of how it is attempting to foster economic security and connectivity.
India has an important role to play in revitalising a framework for South-South cooperation. This scheme of collaboration is meant to support the existing North-South partnerships, not replace them. India’s pragmatic stance — a multi-alignment approach — is non-Western in nature and is not anti-Western. Having assumed the BRICS presidency from this year, India should look to repurpose multi-alignment as a broader example of South-South cooperation.
In fact, it should push for partnerships with like-minded countries to establish triangular cooperative projects in developing regions such as the Pacific Islands or Africa. This can include partnering with Australia, Japan, France, Italy, or the European Union, for instance, to help leverage the capacities of other developing countries. Moving from an aided world to a cooperative set-up appears best suited to meet India’s geopolitical and geoeconomic ambitions.
Through multi-alignment, New Delhi can possibly reshape aid norms, minimise trade-offs, and maximise developmental outputs for a pragmatic future.