Britain’s investments in other organizations, such as the Gavi vaccine alliance and the Global Fund epidemic group, will be replenished when they come up for renewal — though whether they will be as generous this time around is an open question. The FCDO is under pressure, like all departments, to cut spending as part of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ spending review.
“Interesting in all of this is, what do leaders in developing countries want?” said Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director general of the international affairs think tank RUSI. “Often their priorities are more about economic growth and development and infrastructure and energy than they are [about] poverty reduction and social protection, which the U.K. has done quite a bit on.”
“In quite a lot of British politics, the U.K. and Africa [are] seen primarily in aid terms,” Chalmers said. “There’s an element of what Lammy is about which is about moving beyond aid, which the Foreign Office traditionally does — and because of the merger, that Foreign Office narrative is a more dominant one.
“When DFID was a separate department, then it was always defined by having an objective that was not linked to wider geopolitical objectives, it was about poverty reduction.”
National interests
A major strand of the FCDO’s development work involves addressing the root causes that force people to flee their homes, which include climate change and conflict. A greater focus on and funding for this marks a change from recent years, when U.K. spending on conflict prevention and resolution fell from 4 percent of the aid budget to 1 percent.
Yet while conflict and security has been a major theme of the Foreign Office’s direction under Lammy, next month sees a cliff edge for dozens of international security programs, including on counterterrorism, funded by the British government.