In recent months, international aid and development assistance has witnessed major upheavals under Donald Trump’s new US government. While the US has frozen all foreign assistance and shut down the 60 year old US Agency for International Development, some European countries have followed suit, sacrificing overseas development aid in favour of defence spending increases. .

This webinar is concerned with the implications of these profound changes on the lives of the most vulnerable, on existential planetary crises, and on the future of development cooperation. We invite three experts – Duncan Green (LSE and formally Oxfam GB), Indrajit Roy (University of York) and Sayed Jalal Shajjan (Journalist and development practitioner) - to share their perspectives on the impacts of these changes on global development and humanitarian assistance. The session will be chaired by Sara De Jong (University of York).

Speaker biographies

Duncan Green is Professor in Practice at the International Development Department of the London School of Economics and the LSE’s Firoze Lalji Institute for Africa. He recently ended 20 years with Oxfam GB as head of research and strategic adviser.

He is Director of the Global Executive Leadership Initiative course on influencing, run by UNOPS and hosted by the LSE, which since early 2022 has been training hand-picked groups of senior leaders at national level (UN, INGOs, Red Cross/Crescent and national NGOs) to become more effective in influencing governments, societies and the international system.

He is an Adviser to Building Community Engagement in Papua New Guinea programme, on strategy, theories of change and mentoring for senior leadership, and undertakes various consultancies around influencing, advocacy and campaigns for Chatham House, the Asfari Foundation and others

Full bio here.

Sayed Jalal Shajjan is a journalist and development practitioner with over a decade of experience in the humanitarian and development sectors. A recipient of the Concordia Prize for Human Rights, his writing has appeared in Al Jazeera, Vice, and The New Arab, where he explores the human cost of conflict and displacement.

Indrajit Roy worked in the development sector for seven years prior to undertaking his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford. Since obtaining a doctorate in development studies, he has held the ESRC Future Research Leader Fellowship at the Oxford Department of International Development (ODID) as well as a Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. His research and teaching contribute to critical approaches to studying the politics of global development, with a focus on ‘new development futures’ that promise to reframe the discipline.

Accredited as a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Indrajit has innovated teaching and curriculum design over the last several years of his academic life. He won a Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Oxford in 2016. Since joining the University of York in 2017, he is working with colleagues to diversify and decolonise the departmental curriculum.

What do aid cuts mean for the world’s most vulnerable?