This Week in Global Development

This week we are in Antalya, Turkey, for the 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP31 — and bring you insight into how it is on the ground, including a commute that can take up to three hours, standstill traffic, and severe logistical bottlenecks making it difficult to access the venue. 

With the United Kingdom as the only member of the Group of Seven advanced economies with a head of government in attendance, this year’s climate summit is facing a notable leadership void. Dubbed the “implementation” COP, the “Action Agenda” has taken center stage. We unpack the shift in focus and discuss how this event starkly contrasts with those we’ve covered in the past.

As with previous summits, climate finance is at the forefront of negotiations, with developing countries calling for an increase in the $300 billion commitment in climate finance for lower-income countries made at COP29. Meanwhile, there are ongoing discussions about tripling the Adaptation Fund, meant to finance climate adaptation projects in low- and middle-income countries that are especially vulnerable to climate change, but the baseline and target numbers remain unclear.

To explore these stories from COP31 and others, Business Editor David Ainsworth sits down with reporters Elissa Miolene and Jesse Chase-Lubitz for the latest episode of our weekly podcast series.

In this special edition episode of This Week in Global Development, sponsored by IDRC, Devex Executive Editor Kate Warren hosts Julie Delahanty, president of IDRC. and Margarita Gómez, executive director of Southern Voice, to discuss the shift away from traditional donor-recipient models toward equitable, co-created research partnerships.

As cross-border challenges — from climate change and disease outbreaks to artificial intelligence regulation — expose the limits of traditional development, leaders are calling for mutual, shared-interest frameworks. This episode explores how shifting research funding, leadership, and priority-setting to global south institutions fosters local capacity, builds trust, and drives sustainable progress.

Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or SoundCloud, or search “Devex” in your favorite podcast app. Subscribe to Devex for more insights on global development, international cooperation, and sustainability.

Across the global development landscape, the accelerating demand for critical transition minerals such as copper, nickel, lithium, and cobalt presents both a massive economic opportunity and a complex security challenge. However, moving past raw commodity extraction to deliver measurable, population-level energy resilience and value retention amid geopolitical supply chain disruptions is rarely a pure mining challenge — it is an organizational, policy, and human one.

In this special edition episode of the This Week in Global Development podcast, sponsored by the Open Society Foundations, Devex Executive Vice President and  Executive Editor Kate Warren sits down with Deprose Muchena, director of Resources Futures in Africa at Open Society Foundations, and Faris Abdurrachman, executive director of Industrial Policy Lab Indonesia. Together, they unpack why resource-rich nations in the global south currently retain less than 20% of mineral value, how Indonesia’s nickel export restrictions expanded domestic processing, and how stronger ASEAN-Africa cooperation, collective bargaining, and community-centered governance can transform raw mineral wealth into shared industrial power and domestic clean energy access.

This week, we take a look at the results of the U.S. midterm elections, in which the Democratic Party flipped control of the Senate and Congress. We explore the results’ implications for the global development sector and how they could potentially impact the country’s approach to foreign assistance, including which key discussion points to keep an eye on.

On the topic of the U.S. foreign aid, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, is rolling out the second tranche of a $1.8 billion funding round from the Department of State. While the 12-month initiative nearly doubles direct funding to local nonprofits, U.N. agencies are still receiving the bulk of the $756 million disbursed to date. We assess the details of the initiative and examine how the recent Democratic sweep in Congress might impact U.S. funding strategies.

To dig into these stories, and others, Adva Saldinger sits down with Michael Igoe and Elissa Miolene for the latest episode of our weekly podcast series.

In the sponsored segment of the podcast, hosted in partnership with The Pfizer Foundation*, Devex co-founder and Executive Vice President Alan Robbins speaks with Dr. Pearl Nanka-Bruce, country director of Jhpiego Ghana, about how community-centered innovation and local leadership are being leveraged to improve access to timely breast cancer detection, diagnosis, and care in low- and middle-income countries through The Pfizer Foundation’s Action & Impact initiative.

*Founded in 1953 by Pfizer Inc. as a charitable organization, The Pfizer Foundation is a separate legal entity from Pfizer Inc. with distinct legal restrictions.

In this special episode of This Week in Global Development sponsored by the Lipman Family Prize, Kate Warren, Devex executive vice president and executive editor, sits down with Kaushik Kappagantulu, co-founder of Kheyti, and Thabo Lenneiye, former prize committee member and inaugural managing director of the Carl H. Goldsmith Sustainable Agriculture Fund at Penn’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy.

Together, they explore what it actually takes to turn a working solution like Kheyti’s Greenhouse-in-a-Box into policy that can scale beyond one organization and why practical, ground-level experience is crucial for shaping effective, sustainable change.