A Decade Since Busan: Towards Legitimacy or a ‘New Tyranny’ of Global Development Partnership?

In 2011, the Busan Forum on Development Effectiveness announced the creation of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC). The GPEDC promised to replace the old donor–recipient dynamic in international development with ‘an equator-less landscape of multistakeholder global partnership’ (Eyben & Savage, 2013). Multistakeholder partnerships (MSPs) have since become the global governance modality of choice for the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Advocates maintain that MSPs provide more legitimate and effective governance than interstate multilateralism. But critics contend that MSPs co-opt subaltern voices and reinscribe power asymmetries: MSPs may, thus, constitute a ‘New Tyranny’ within global development governance (Cooke & Kothari, 2001). Drawing on extensive empirical research, this article examines the extent to which the GPEDC provides more legitimate governance or effects akin to a ‘New Tyranny’. Against dichotomous portrayals of MSPs as either inherently ‘legitimate’ or ‘tyrannical’, the article finds that MSPs such as the GPEDC constitute spaces wherein normative principles of world order are negotiated. Nevertheless, the article finds that we are no closer to a global development partnership than we were at Busan.