THE ERA OF CRISIS AND DEVELOPMENT DEFERRED: THE CENTER FOR GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT.

The Center for Global Development (CGD) is an international think tank based in Washington, D.C. and London committed to improving development policy and holding governments and institutions accountable. Amid global disruption from the war in Ukraine, the Journal spoke with Mikaela Gavas, Managing Director of CGD Europe, in London, about the current state of global poverty and a slowdown in development around the world, how the simultaneous shocks of climate change and COVID-19 and conflict have upended business as usual, and why the war in Ukraine is only one reason why the world is not on track to meet its development and poverty-alleviation goals in the coming years.

Journal of International Affairs (JIA): Provide an introduction to the Center for Global Development and its day-to-day mission and activities.

Mikaela Gavas (MG): CGD is an independent think tank based in Washington, D.C. and London. Our work is essentially geared towards finding solutions to some of the problems that the world is facing, in particular around how to achieve development in some of the poorest countries. Essentially, we're guided by a sense that investment and sustainable solutions are at the core of development progress, and we see our role is threefold. First, as change makers, we develop the ideas that lead to smart policy solutions to critical development problems. Second, we see ourselves as agenda-setters, so we do a lot of convening and facilitating of conversations to try and shape the global agenda. Third, we see ourselves as watchdogs, challenging governments, challenging institutions, and challenging the status quo for better approaches to development and therefore better results for the poorest and most vulnerable. That's what we do, in a nutshell. We have some thematic areas of focus, which are global health, global education, migration and displacement, humanitarian aid, sustainable development finance, as well as quite a large program on governments and institutions. Within that, we focus on the UK and on Europe, so EU institutions and some Member States such as France and Germany. There is also a U.S. Government focus.

JIA: According to CGD, what was the status quo in terms of development and humanitarian response, prior to February 2022?

MG: I think the status quo, and how it got to this point, goes further back than 2022. We are facing unprecedented levels of uncertainty, and the future is not looking quite that bright anymore. This is a result of three big shocks that have happened. The first, obviously, was COVID-19. The second is climate change, which has been going on for some time, but we see the effects increasing and being exacerbated. The third was the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The state of the world is how it is essentially because of the combination of those three shocks. I've seen a lot of coverage of this, and people talk about the "perfect storm"--actually, it's not the perfect storm in the conventional sense of the phrase, as in a one-off conjunction of those events. What we're facing instead is a confluence of lasting structural insecurities: whether that's political, socioeconomic, or existential, and they're all reinforcing each other. That's the situation we find ourselves in today.

JIA: How specifically are these three shocks interacting and even reinforcing one another?

MG: These three phenomena, these interconnected crises, have had multiple effects, but in particular on some of the poorest countries, which are inherently vulnerable to shocks and have had the least capacity to actually manage things when crises hit. What we've seen is that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has significantly accelerated and exacerbated the slow-down in global growth, which began with COVID but has recently accelerated. What we're seeing now is economic divergence that is persisting and growing. It actually opened up in 2021, propelled by COVID-19: this divergence between advanced and developing countries. But now we see it's persisting and growing, and we have serious problems.

The three shocks have essentially fueled inflation, protectionism, debt crises, humanitarian and refugee crises, and also the resurgence of global poverty. I will take each of those in turn.

If we look at debt, public debt has reached critical levels. I think three in five of the poorest countries are at high risk, or are already in debt distress. One in four middle-income countries are at high risk of fiscal crisis. Again, we're really in the midst of a huge debt crisis, one that we haven't seen since for decades.

Food prices hit record levels last year. I think they rose by 23% in 2021 as well. This is, in part, because of extreme weather which hurt harvests and agriculture broadly. Then, Russia's invasion of Ukraine sent energy costs and food prices--specifically the food price index--to an all-time high.

High inflation continues to rise, and the fact that the pandemic caused supply chains to snarl--then you have climate change on top of that, which threatens production across many of the world's agricultural regions--has also fueled inflation. There are more droughts, more flooding, heat, wildfires, and so on.

Now, a word about protectionism. Actually, it's protectionism that is exacerbating the chaos in global food markets, brought on by the war in Ukraine. Governments are tamping down on exports of...