In September 2025, Adam Tooze sent a shock wave through Development studies circles (in the West) with an essay entitled “The End of Development”. He declared the evident truth that “the West’s aid model was always a mirage” and that “the UN Sustainable Development Goals now look less like a new dawn than the final gasp of a unipolar, end-of-history fantasy”. Yet, so-called ‘development’ speaks to more than aid and Western dominance. This blog post argues that what might be the end of aid could be the beginning of understanding and studying development as an endogenous process within international constraints and opportunities. For this to happen, we, as development scholars, need to resist falling back into narrow conceptions of ‘Development’ as either aid-based or big power rivalry and overcome anxious paralysis and self-pity over the end of uncontested US hegemony. Instead, we need to use the current moment as an opportunity to rethink and finally effectively conceptualise how national politics and global economic structures condition each other.

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