As the Future of Development Co-operation Conference closed last week in Paris, and the Global Partnerships Conference convenes this week in London, expectations are set around reimagining the future of development cooperation. A new joint paper from the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) and RAKSHA Intelligence Futures offers a structural reading of where the resilience and adaptation finance landscape now sits — and of why institutions are not yet acting on what they already know.
Finance in Flux: The Fracturing Landscape for Resilience and Adaptation Finance draws on RAKSHA’s structured analysis of resilience and adaptation finance flows from 2024 to 2026, and on practitioner stress-testing of that analysis through the Resilience Faultlines Dialogue Lab, convened by GRP and RAKSHA under Chatham House rules in March 2026.
The paper’s argument is that the standard account, ODA contracting, climate finance under-allocating adaptation, and alternative instruments not filling the gap, is correct, however incomplete in a way that matters. The paper argues that the contraction is structural rather than cyclical. The seventeen largest DAC donors are projected to reduce their combined ODA allocation by $40–60 billion, with the combined effect characterised as “burden-shedding,” as grant-heavy portfolios are being cut while commercially viable alternatives are positioned as permanent replacements rather than transitional instruments. Yet, adaptation and resilience generate diffuse public benefits that do not match the time horizons or risk preferences of private capital, and blended finance, which has remained a “cottage industry” of around $15.5 billion across 84 deals, reaching less than 10 per cent of its volume into adaptation-focused or LDC-targeted deals.
The paper also examines the substitution arithmetic that has positioned China and Gulf states as replacement sources. Chinese climate-related finance has averaged $3.8 billion per year since 2013, and the 15th Five-Year Plan published in March 2026 confirms a strategic reorientation toward connectivity and trade integration rather than toward the categories where the ODA contraction is biting hardest. The Gulf picture has become materially more volatile in the last six months, with defence commitments reshaping disbursement reliability.
Five forward signals receive close attention in the report:
- Insurance withdrawal as a real-time price signal that private capital is already responding to;
- Sovereign debt as a resilience trap that crowds out adaptation before bilateral finance enters the picture;
- MDB capital expansion of around $300 billion in new lending headroom, of which less than 10 per cent appears to be reaching resilience programming;
- The proliferation of climate funder networks since 2023 without a shared architecture for collective allocation decisions; and
- The centralisation of risk analytics, with approximately 80 per cent of adaptation-relevant risk data now sitting in proprietary systems.
“We treated all this work as a deliverable, not as a preparedness plan. And more significantly, we didn’t marry our decision making with it. It wasn’t a failure of foresight, it was a failure of decision making.”
— Participant, philanthropic sector, Resilience Faultlines Dialogue Lab
This is the question the paper puts to the institutions convening this week in London: not whether ODA will return to its pre-2024 shape, but what kind of decision-making architecture would be needed to translate the analysis the sector already has into the choices the moment now requires?
GRP and RAKSHA Intelligence Futures will continue to convene strategic conversations around these questions. The value of doing so, the paper argues, will depend on whether participating institutions treat the work as a preparedness plan rather than as a deliverable filed alongside unchanged plans. That is the harder problem, and on the evidence available it is the one this moment now requires the sector to take up.
