The availability of funding for international development is on the decline.

The United States, the world’s largest international development donor in historical terms, recently announced massive foreign aid cuts. It also dismantled much of its institutional capacity to deliver development programs and humanitarian assistance and announced that any future aid efforts would have to align with its foreign policy priorities.

The threat of similar cuts looms over many civil society organizations relying on funding from Europe where the political climate is also shifting.

As a result, thousands of civil society organizations around the world have ceased to operate, halting efforts to advance human rights and uphold human dignity in ways that are probably too early to fully understand. Other organizations – WACC included – are bracing for possible future cuts or anticipating how to reposition themselves in a post-aid world.

In this context, with many international development actors in full-blown crisis mode, there are some voices calling for a reassessment of development as a whole and for building a brand-new framework. They include the authors of an article series about bidding farewell to white saviorism and decolonizing aid published in El Pais in April.

After highlighting the many structural issues at the heart of development and humanitarian aid – from the agendas set by donors in the North predominating to the notion that the absurd salary disparities between Northern and Southern employees in the sector are somehow justified by the value of Northern knowledge – the articles point to several emerging initiatives that are trying to transform what development looks like.

Some of these include a true prioritization of national actors in terms of funding and policy decisions, a global effort to alleviate the debt burden of many developing countries, and the establishment of new relationships based on mutual respect between grant makers and grantees.

They also point to organizations in countries like Guatemala, Sudan,  and Somalia that are establishing their own funds and endowments, rejecting funds they see as colonial, and centering Indigenous and feminist ways of knowing as examples of work already being done to challenge the status quo.

WACC tends to agree with much of this analysis. Our own journey as an organization and our mission – the promotion of communication as a human right that goes far beyond the essential but insufficient right to freedom of expression and that is at the heart of people’s dignity – is the result of years of struggle to challenge and dismantle colonial and communication information flows.

In the same way, we believe that the development model, a global political and economic project that emerged at the end of WWII and is embodied in institutions such as the World Bank, needs to be turned on its head. We need new development models that do not destroy the natural environment, are truly participatory, and stop centering Northern knowledge and languages to give way to Southern epistemologies.

As we embark on the journey of imagining what a post-aid world could look like, or at least a world where the international development system sheds its colonial mindset, WACC believes that communication justice must be at the heart of the conversation.

Given the general reluctance of dominant development approaches to see the distribution of communication power as a central issue for social justice – perhaps because it has been seen as too political in some corners – the emergence of a new understanding of development presents important opportunities.

In practice, we believe that issues such as democratic data ownership, media regulation that serves the common good, the democratization of media power, and a fair and transparent knowledge regime – all of which are essential for a world in which people are at the center of the decisions that affect their lives – need to be prioritized.

With the newly released publication Taking a Progressive and Decolonial Approach to Digital Ecosystems, WACC invites a deeper look at these communication rights issues as essential building blocks to decolonizing international development.

Members of Sulá Batsú Cooperative from the Cabécar Indigenous community in Costa Rica hold an assembly to discuss communication and media sovereignty. Photo: Sulá Batsú Cooperative