By José Antonio Ocampo
BOGOTA, Colombia, Jun 25 2025 – Leaders heading to the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development taking place in Sevilla, Spain, from 30th June to 3rd July, know full well that they are operating in a moment of crisis.

They can see that public financing is not merely constrained, it is choked, and that the social consequences, already severe, risk becoming catastrophic. What leaders need to understand is not that they are in a hole, but that there is a way out. They can overcome the financing crisis and replace the doom loop of austerity with an upward spiral of social and fiscal success.

The scale of change in financing that is needed to overcome the crisis requires that the very welcome agreements set to be made at the gathering in Sevilla mark not an end point, easing pressures, but a starting point, enabling profound reform. The only realistic response to this crisis is a systemic one.

Leaders need not only to put in place debt relief for overindebted developing countries, including reductions in principals and in interest payments. They need to work to create a permanent institutional mechanism for sovereign-debt restructuring. They need to enable a major expansion of long-term, low-cost financing through regional and global development finance institutions.

José Antonio Ocampo

Leaders need not only to strengthen coordination to prevent tax avoidance. They need to work, through the negotiations for the United Nations framework convention on international tax cooperation, to reallocate taxation rights fairly among all countries where multinational firms do business. They need to raise the global effective minimum tax on multinationals’ profits, and to introduce minimum standards for the taxation of the richest individuals.

Leaders need not only to halt the freefall of development financing. They need to work to redesign financing for the twenty-first century. Embodying hope that a transformation can be realised is the growing momentum for global public investment. Colombia, Chile, Norway, South Africa and Uruguay are amongst the countries leading the call.

South Africa’s leadership of the G20’s Development Working Group has even named “global public goods and global public investment” as its “number one priority”, “aimed at the construction of a new architecture of international cooperation”.

Over fifty civil society organisations are also backing the call for global public investment, including the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition, Southern Voice, CIVICUS, and Global Citizen. A new multistakeholder commitment to advance the implementation of global public investment will be a key initiative in the financing conference’s flagship Sevilla Platform for Action.

Global public investment provides a new approach for how countries can think about, organise, and oversee the financing of global challenges. It is rooted in three principles: all benefit from the outcomes; all contribute according to their means; all decide together.

The first principle of global public investment, that all benefit from the outcomes, demonstrates that international cooperation in financing is not charity, it is collective self-interest. We need each other; we can’t afford not to cooperate with each other to achieve shared goals.

The second principle, that all contribute according to their means, helps to show everyone playing their part, which is essential both for ensuring backing and for reshaping countries’ relationships, status and power.

The third principle, that all decide together, enables equality and quality in the direction and oversight of resourcing.

The global public investment approach recognises that the crisis we are in is not only fiscal but ultimately political – a crisis of multilateralism, of collective action. It meets the world’s need for a more effective way for countries to collaborate, and for a more effective way to justify why they do. It shows that looking out for each other is how we protect ourselves; it demonstrates that through pooling of resources everyone wins out.

Though the current crisis in financing was exacerbated suddenly this year, it has been building for much longer. For years, leaders have been struggling to mobilise and structure the resourcing of public goods. But they need to resist the temptation to lower ambition. They cannot afford to settle for approaches that have been shown to not deliver. Retreating from public financing, or retreating from international cooperation, will only worsen the impacts of the global crisis.

The evidence is clear that private financing, though vital, cannot replace public financing. So too, the record shows that national action, though central, is insufficient for protecting global public goods. For the challenges we face, building a new international architecture based around global public investment is both necessary and feasible.

Global public investment harnesses both the power of mutual interest – that we are interdependent – and the power of mutuality – that we achieve more by working together. It is an approach whose time has come.

Sevilla is just the start.

IPS UN Bureau

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José Antonio Ocampo is Former UN Under-Secretary-General; Former Minister of Finance of Colombia; Professor at Columbia University and Member of the UN Committee for Development Policy