Development that was a mainstay in many global forum - whether it be about poverty alleviation, healthcare, climate change adoption and education, no longer amongst the top headlines in the world in 2026. Since the beginning of 2026, almost the entire headlines has been on war and trade, as though these are the global priorities and not climate change and healthcare. Even Indian media's outlook since the beginning of this year has been on the budget for defense forces, our persistent chest thumping on AI leadership, and implications of US trade tariff on India and the overall politics around the same.
Changing Political Landscape
We watch Trump destroying an image that American governments have successfully maintained all along since the 2nd world war, we see the slow but steady parting of ways between European and American partners with USA. We see a Nation State steamrolling of global trade negotiations almost leveraging on everything from ego-massaging to blackmailing. We also see a scramble for nations with weak economic architecture from one hegemonic power to another, or try and form new alliances as a multi-polar world.
These have resulted in intense conversations across the world on the changing economic, Nation State and political ideological landscape itself. Some of the conversations I have had in the recent times have been on the future of Democracy, the re-shaping of the Nation State, and the re-alignment of political ideologies.
Re-thinking of Political Ideologies
Left and Right have been shaping the dominant political narrative in the last century and both have reached a dead-end, with corporate control ultimately determining their narrow pathways of moving forward. Recently a few of us bothered about the political landscape gathered in Sevagram Ashram in central India. One of the leading public intellectuals of India, Yogendra Yadav outlined the challenge of our times during this programme. He positioned the post-Colonial Indian ideological tendencies as egalitarian ideological frameworks of marxism, socialism,etc., on the one side and those attempting to de-colonize and pursue traditional frameworks on the other side. He said how the egalitarian ones have all aligned themselves with the modernity rather than traditions.
While there was an egalitarian tradition in India before the Colonial time as well, the new found egalitarian political frameworks often tended to ignore the same. Modernity became an inevitable universe in which growth and development agenda was accepted. "Euro-Normality" whereby normalizing all positive and negative tendencies using European development scale was accepted. Dalit movement was the very recent of the egalitarian frameworks to emerge and unfortunately, alike all previous ones, this one too soon reached a dead-end. Core to this was the denial of the culture (and often religion by extension) of people of the land.
On the other side, the de-colonizing or indigenous pursuit was powered by others, among the prominent ones he places Babu Bankim Chandra, Sri Aurobindo and partly even Gandhi (though he was quick to state that Gandhi defied this categorization as well) and so was Vinobha. Many of the genuine later day de-coloniziong scholars were denied their place in the mainstream scholarship dominated by the egalitarian brigade of various kinds and thus pushed into the emerging rightwing camp. Many of these scholars were rejecting the euro-normality, which was unacceptable to the academia dominated by the egalitarians.
Now with the current crisis, it is important that both sides sit together and look at addressing the pressing needs of humanity. Towards this, most educated scholars and intellectuals who consider themselves liberals and subscribed to the egalitarian frameworks need to drop their disdain for religion, cultural heritage and practices. Language and Nationalism are the other factors that the liberals look down upon and thereby made it a right-wing (or conservative if you may) agenda. Yogendra Yadav has captured the key insights from the deliberations in an article available online here.
Nation State Re-imagined
While there are dialogues around the Nationality on the one hand, there are other dialogues around the failure of the current idea of the Nation State again driven by the American standardization of the definition in practice over the last century. Rev. Sara Wolcott of Sequoia Samanvaya had a long conversation on the idea of Nation State itself over a call recently. Her question was the basis on which the Nation State's were built and how the same is changing, particularly in the American context. Recently there have been ignoramus American 'nationalists' who have asked the Native Americans to go back to their land! Talks of Sovereignty and Inclusion ensued and she made an interesting observation that communities talk about Sovereignty only until they are made to access credit, once credit kicks in, there is only talk of inclusion. That there is a direct link between credit linkage and loss of freedom. Like the author Rana Dasgupta says in the Introduction to the recent publication After Nation, "'whatever freedom it offers are founded in this primordial unfreedom: we cannot not belong to a nation-state (to which 99.75 of all humans in the planet belong to). In conclusion towards the end of this book, he states, "Everything hinges on our ability to reformulate our relationship to nature. This must draw on the wisdom of nomadic and agrarian societies, past and present; it must enable new, hi-tech conceptions of citizenship and economy; it must help the monopolies of states give way to a multiplicity of mutually beneficial systems; and it must ultimately enable us to live in greater security with each other and with the earth". One may think that this has been realized in Rio and subsequently brought into the global developmental agenda through the MDG and SDG goals that have emphasized the natural challenges and the Paris accord that brought 193 nations to sign to a voluntary target to achieve a global good.
Changing Development Priorities
That brings us to the most important question -- How does the changing political ecosystem of ideological and political nature, impact the 'Development' agenda for all of us? particularly the dropping of the climate change response from the global agenda?
So, who owns the global Development agenda? These last several decades, we are used to the multi-lateral organizations setting the global framework and priorities for 'development' without challenging the hegemony of the western powers. With the control of the purse strings for 'development' projects, and carefully curated global ranking indices, they have controlled economies of lesser Nation States, their self-image as well as priorities of development.
But, all this has changed in the last few months rapidly. In case you didn't notice, multilateral agencies have changed their language, thereby the urgency and the shift in priority, during the last few months of second Trump era. If there is one urgent global need that has been silenced, it is the very urgent nature of climate change adoption and mitigation strategy that was obvious till a year ago.
How are the normative changes getting to be converted into pragmatic framing? here are some examples of how terms are getting to be morphed into mellifluous ambiguities rather than urgent alarming ones --
“Mitigation urgency” → “adaptation and resilience”
“Net-zero pathway” → “technology-driven transition”
“Climate justice” → “energy affordability and security”
“phase-out” → “phase-down”
“stranded assets” → “orderly transition”
“fossil elimination” → “diversified energy mix”
“just transition” → “balanced transition”
“climate finance obligations” → “mobilising private capital”
“loss and damage compensation” → “risk management instruments”
“grant-based support” → “blended finance”
“development aid” → “investment partnerships”
“environmental justice” → “community resilience”
“regulatory standards” → “innovation-led solutions”
“pollution reduction targets” → “performance-based frameworks”
The fundamental shift in the post-Trump period has been the moral shift of obligation and justice being replaced by the techno-economic framing through innovation and financing language. Financing has moved from regulatory to blended and private capital oriented. There is also a visible increase in the adoption language on Climate Change rather than mitigation. While these maybe explained away as consensus maintenance amongst the member nations of the multi-lateral agencies, truth be told, this is succumbing to the hidden pressure of the post-Trumpian denial of climate change, promotion of fossil fuel and refusal of environmental accountability, particularly to those who are most vulnerable to climate change.
Most staff in the multi-lateral institutions need to realign their own moral compass to work in these times, financial and technological (particularly AI) ones have it easy as the growing clout of private sector participation and major investments in development going to private sector interests, obviously keeps them busy. The ones with the social sector specialization of inclusion, conservation, mitigation or regeneration are the ones who need to re-align the most. I have seen community institution strengthening being replaced by AI based monitoring as a priority in the project design, skill development for local resilience being lowered in priority to skills that are aligned to industries, creative social media communication often having higher budget than participatory process design or communication consultative meetings. So, definitely the cascading impact of shifting focus on the climate change has an impact on the development agenda overall.
Climate Change response is a priority for agriculture, livelihoods that are dependent on nature, food security, fodder, coastal ecosystem, marine life and all life forms. Regardless of whatever arms race takes place and whatever is promoted as security, every delay in the seasonal rains by even a few days and / or unseasonal rainfall impacts everyone. Perhaps for a brief moment in history every nation is on its own and can play a role in the global space at the same time. India perhaps has a role if only we become far more process oriented and far less driven only by optics.
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