This commentary examines the impacts of declining Overseas Development Assistance on development geographies, suggesting critical implications for future aid frameworks.
This short commentary hopes to stimulate debate about reductions in Overseas Development Assistance (ODA), particularly by the United States and the United Kingdom in 2025. Drawing on three key areas of geographical scholarship, we consider firstly the intersections between ODA and labour geographies, secondly we engage with relational theorising to consider repercussions for development ecosystems, and finally we explore potential impacts on the wider geographies of aid and development. In doing so, we hope to use these geographically inspired lenses to broaden conversations about declining ODA and ‘Aidland’ and to acknowledge and surface the contradictions presented to development geographers at this critical moment. By articulating the potential of geographically inspired scholarship for thinking about declining ODA, we conclude by opening up further questions about future ‘public’ geographies of development.
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Peck et al. (2026) studied this question.
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