This article appears in the Fall 2025 print issue: The End of Development. Read more from the issue.

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United Nations summits typically unfold with a feverish intensity. Official delegates battle over every verb, dollar figure, and timeline in the outcome document. But there was little drama of multilateralism at the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4) this July in Seville, Spain. After the United States withdrew in June, delegates agreed on the final draft—the Seville Commitment—two weeks ahead of the actual meeting.

Still, the world gathered in Seville, in sweltering temperatures topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit, a not-too-subtle omen of the climate hell we were there to ostensibly avert. Around 6,000 corporate lobbyists (nearly half the attendees) swarmed plenary halls, peddling private capital for “investible development” while delegates from the global south pleaded for debt relief and climate finance.

United Nations summits typically unfold with a feverish intensity. Official delegates battle over every verb, dollar figure, and timeline in the outcome document. But there was little drama of multilateralism at the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4) this July in Seville, Spain. After the United States withdrew in June, delegates agreed on the final draft—the Seville Commitment—two weeks ahead of the actual meeting.

Still, the world gathered in Seville, in sweltering temperatures topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit, a not-too-subtle omen of the climate hell we were there to ostensibly avert. Around 6,000 corporate lobbyists (nearly half the attendees) swarmed plenary halls, peddling private capital for “investible development” while delegates from the global south pleaded for debt relief and climate finance.

A decade after its launch at the FFD conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the investible development paradigm remains the unshakable consensus. In Addis Ababa, the World Bank gave it a catchy slogan: “Billions to Trillions.” Billions in public money, be it development finance or local fiscal resources, could activate the power of private cash. Institutional investors alone had the trillions to finance transformative projects and should be enticed into investible development partnerships with the state.

I termed this paradigm the Wall Street Consensus, to capture the turn to development as an asset class while tracing the continuities from the Washington Consensus, the neoliberal paradigm that reigned during the golden age of U.S. hegemony in international development. The new consensus adopted financiers’ view of development: privately owned, for-profit projects with returns improved—in financiers’ jargon, “de-risked”—by public subsidies and favorable regulations. A new hospital or housing complex becomes investible once financiers such as BlackRock or Blackstone get concessional loans from the World Bank and local fiscal resources to guarantee a certain risk-adjusted return. The same investment demands apply to renewables,........

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