The Compromiso de Sevilla Marks a New Path for Development Finance

The UN’s 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4) convened in Sevilla, Spain from June 30 to July 3 at one of the most challenging moments for global development in history. With global official development assistance (ODA) projected to decline between 9 and 17 percent in 2025 alone and 3.4 billion people living in countries with crushing debt burdens, the stakes could hardly have been higher. The same could be said of the sweltering heat, with temperatures exceeding 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Against this daunting backdrop, the 15,000 attendees—including over forty heads of state and government and over 120 ministers—gathered to try to close a $4 trillion gap in development financing for the beleaguered Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Despite this difficult context and the months of contentious negotiations that preceded it, the conference produced an important outcome document. The Compromiso de Sevilla, signed by nearly all UN member states, was a hard-fought agreement that many feared would never materialize. Its realization is a testament to hundreds of committed diplomats, international civil servants, and civil society advocates. It owes a particular debt to the deft leadership and diplomatic maneuvering of ambassadors from Mexico, Nepal, Norway, and Zambia, who were facilitating negotiations, along with Spain as the conference host and the UN secretariat team.

The ultimate document they produced underscores a collective obligation to advance development, rather than a mere bargain between the Global North and South. Indeed, the very name—Compromiso de Sevilla—signals this distinction: While English speakers might hear “compromise” in the Spanish “compromiso,” the word actually means “commitment,” a linguistic nuance that captures the document’s aspirational rather than merely transactional character.

Despite some disappointments, the Compromiso de Sevilla is a major win for the Global South, particularly developing countries most vulnerable to economic shocks. It marked the emergence of a new path for international cooperation, based on three principles: maximizing development impact, giving Global South countries greater voice and influence over financial and debt structures, and strengthening country leadership and country-led initiatives. The fact that an outcome was reached by consensus provides yet another signal that a new breed of multilateralism is emerging to meet the needs of the moment—albeit one without the United States.

The Path to Sevilla

FFD4 is the fourth in a series of major multilateral conferences designed to increase financing for, and decrease barriers to, sustainable development. The first, which convened in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2002, may be best remembered as a grand bargain. Developed countries by and large committed to providing development assistance at 0.7 percent of their gross national incomes (GNIs), and developing countries agreed to shore up their governance of aid in pursuit of the Millennium Development Goals. Coming on the heels of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Monterrey Consensus was facilitated by the George W. Bush administration’s desire to invest in economic development in poorer countries, lest they become havens of terrorism. The second FFD, which took place in Doha in 2008, recognized the impact of the global financial crisis on development and emphasized the need for reforms to the international financial system.

In 2015, the third FFD led to the most recent UN development financing agreement prior to Sevilla, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA). Beyond highlighting the importance of domestic resource mobilization by developing countries themselves, it emphasized the catalytic impact of “billions to trillions”—leveraging the billions of dollars in official development assistance to mobilize trillions of dollars in private capital and investments of all kinds to meet the financing needs of sustainable development. Unfortunately, the hype fell flat, dashing development dreams.

At the outset of FFD4, the four co-facilitators—Mexico, Nepal, Norway, and Zambia—agreed that the AAAA and the September 2024 UN Pact for the Future, which contained language committing to reforming international financial architecture, must be the minimal level of agreement in Sevilla.

The text of the Compromiso de Sevilla, agreed by consensus after months of deliberation, strikes a careful balancing act between the long-standing negotiating positions of the Global North and Global South. Ironically, North-South consensus was ultimately made possible on the final day of talks, when the United States abruptly withdrew from the negotiations. Rejecting key proposals and expressing concerns about national sovereignty, the U.S. representatives argued that negotiations had failed to deliver “a concise text that does not propose new, costly, and duplicative mechanisms or initiatives that will only undermine the effectiveness of existing efforts.” While the U.S. withdrawal weakens the agreement’s potential impact, it cleared the path for an agreement that might otherwise have been impossible or watered down. Instead, the remaining member states agreed on the outcome document.

To be sure, some delegations from the Global North did so with caveats, dissenting on particular sections of the text while endorsing the overall agreement. The EU, Canada, Japan, and South Korea, for example, dissociated themselves from the commitment to an intergovernmental UN process to close gaps in the debt architecture. The EU also dissociated itself from the paragraph on climate issues, objecting that it was inconsistent with Paris Agreement language outlining principles on equity and common but differentiated responsibilities.

The Outcome

Ultimately, the Compromiso de Sevilla is a substantive advance both for the Global South and the cause of multilateralism. Four key policy provisions stand out.

Alleviating Sovereign Debt Burdens

Lacking an effective global architecture for managing sovereign debt, the world’s poorest countries are paying more on servicing their debt than on health and education combined. Despite sharp North-South differences, negotiators reached agreement on important initiatives to lower debt burdens:

• Creating a borrowers forum with a secretariat in the UN Conference on Trade and Development to provide borrowing states a platform to coordinate
• Convening a new working group under the UN secretary-general, including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, tasked with examining responsible borrowing and lending practices
• Endorsing increased local-currency lending to reduce pressure in crises
• Establishing a global debt registry housed at the World Bank
• Calling for a strengthened G20 Common Framework
• Agreeing on an intergovernmental dialogue at the UN on closing gaps in the debt architecture

The Sevilla Platform for Action, discussed further below, also includes important initiatives on debt. A new Debt Swaps for Development Hub will strengthen capacity and enhance collaboration to scale up debt swaps and lower debt service burdens. Italy’s Debt-for-Development Swap Programme will convert 230 million euros of African countries’ debt into investments in development projects. Finally, a debt “pause clause” alliance, comprising a coalition of countries and multilateral development banks, has committed to suspending debt service payments during crises.

Increasing Trade Access

With global trade barriers rising and concern about further limits to trade access for the least developed countries (LDCs) increasing, trade has reemerged as a pressing issue. After tough negotiations, the compromiso ultimately included actions to increase preferential trade access for LDCs, encourage increased aid-for-trade arrangements, promote LDC integration into global value chains, and support digital trade and e-commerce.

Expanding Domestic Public Resource Mobilization

With international development cooperation faltering and ODA levels falling, donor countries and other states pushed for steps to maximize developing countries’ domestic resource mobilization to ensure that they are able to bring their own financial resources to bear. The Compromiso de Sevilla includes actions to increase transparency and accountability in fiscal systems; commitments to improve capacity building, including vital support for modernizing tax systems; actions to address illicit financial flows (a previously contentious area); and a commitment for donor partners to double their support for domestic resource mobilization, especially to developing countries seeking to increase their ratios of tax to gross domestic product (GDP) to at least 15 percent.

Supporting Faltering International Development Cooperation

The conferees in Sevilla recognized that the old aid-driven model of development cooperation is faltering and that the world needs to overcome current North-South and donor-recipient divides and transition to a more egalitarian and developing country–empowered investment model. It was no small feat, given sharp cuts in ODA by various donor countries, that governments again committed to devote 0.7 percent of GNI to ODA (with 0.15 percent of GNI being devoted to LDCs). The document also called for a tripling of lending by multilateral development banks.

The Sevilla Platform of Action included a number of other proposals, including:

• A global coalition to integrate more comprehensive indicators of sustainable development beyond reliance on GDP
• An effort led by eight governments leading into November’s COP30 climate change conference to introduce global solidarity levies on aviation as a contribution to climate and development
• A global coalition led by the United Kingdom and the multilateral Bridgetown Initiative to scale up prearranged disaster financing by 20 percent by 2035
• Support for the World Health Organization’s 3 by 35 Initiative to promote national health taxes on tobacco, alcohol, and sugary drinks by 2035

To be sure, there were some disappointments. Despite a clear agenda for change, including in the 2024 Pact for the Future, the reform of the international financial institutions was deferred to the authority of the governing boards of those institutions, where developing countries have limited voice or representation. The final compromiso language recommending the establishment of a global beneficial ownership registry, which would increase efforts to reduce illicit financial flows, was diluted to only “consider the feasibility and utility” of such a registry. The outcome document made limited references to expanding Special Drawing Rights or other innovative finance. Finally, the language on debt fell short of the ambition many had hoped for, at a time when many developing countries face crushing debt service burdens.

The Next Steps

As Zambia’s UN ambassador Chola Milambo declared, “at the end of the day, it's going to be implementation that matters.”¹ To build on the Compromiso de Sevilla, the Spanish hosts and the UN proposed a Sevilla Platform for Action to encourage partnerships between member states, civil society, and the private sector to announce initiatives to operationalize and execute specific elements of the agreement. The platform now includes over 130 initiatives, cutting across thematic areas, methods, and political coalitions. Collectively, they suggest increasing awareness that complex multilateral agreements need relentless follow-up efforts to become a reality. Some initiatives may fail, but through sheer volume of ideas and effort, others will have an impact. (Helpfully, the UN has created a digital registry of all initiatives under the Platform for Action.)

Three additional examples of Sevilla Platform for Action initiatives are worth highlighting:

• Ireland, Malawi, Mexico, Nepal, Zambia, and the Gates Foundation announced their plans to establish an independent, expert body called the Future of Development Cooperation Commission, an idea anchored in the outcome document text. This Sevilla Commission intends to analyze data, trends, and evidence on development cooperation and financing flows and to offer a framework and narrative for making a positive case for development cooperation.
• The governments of Colombia and Uruguay are collaborating with the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, Club de Madrid, and the Global Public Investment Network to embed its model of global public investment, which “pools resources and shares decision-making,” within the international financial architecture by 2028.
• The Centre for Policy Dialogue based in Bangladesh, New York University’s Center on International Cooperation (NYU-CIC), and Project Starling (the organization I run) are joining forces to develop a people-centered accountability framework, which will establish country-level and global indicators to track how FFD4 impacts developing countries’ ability to access finance.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez referred to the Platform for Action as the “legacy” of the Sevilla conference. Whether that legacy is one of unfulfilled promises or of concrete actions and partnerships will be determined by the follow-up efforts, including those initiated by the many civil society groups and governments committed to a new era of development cooperation. The negotiations may be over, but the time for action has only just begun.

What FFD4 Means for International Cooperation and Development Finance

The consensus reached in FFD4 reveals multilateralism in transition. Despite the traditional underpinnings of global cooperation continuing to shift rapidly, governments showed they can still reach meaningful agreements on complex issues.

FFD4 joins a growing list of recent examples of what might be seen as the green shoots of a new multilateralism, from the World Health Organization’s Pandemic Agreement to the UN High Seas Treaty to the successful UN Ocean Conference—strengthening the argument that international cooperation is adapting to a difficult moment rather than suffering some historic demise. In each of these outcomes, a pattern has emerged: The United States, under the Trump administration, has opted out of these agreements, and in response, the rest of the world showed its resolve to move ahead anyway. In fact, during FFD4 negotiations, delegates seemed determined to agree on an outcome precisely because success seemed unlikely in this political environment—as if proving that multilateral cooperation is still viable was part of their goal.

The consensus reached in FFD4 reveals multilateralism in transition. Governments showed they can still reach meaningful agreements on complex issues.

As Global North governments reduce international aid commitments, the decades-old development cooperation model is fundamentally changing. The Sevilla conference represents not only an adjustment to new realities but also the groundwork for a development finance system that is becoming both more sustainable and more representative of all stakeholders.