Concluding Remarks: Strategy, Commitment and Prospects

The preceding chapters of this report have reviewed the role that financing plays in the process of development, examined the evolution of international development financing, summarized the main criticisms of development assistance, analysed the main recent initiatives to reform development finance, and explored the possible futures for the mobilization of external financial resources to support development efforts. What emerges clearly from all of this is that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, six decades after international development began to emerge as a field in its own right, the international development financing ‘system’ is really not much of a system. It is rather a collection of disjointed entities that lack coherence, often work at cross-purposes and are not up to the task of mobilizing finance in the amounts and ways required to assist a growing diversity of developing countries in their efforts to reduce poverty and improve living standards.