Double Standards in Financing for Development

The issue of international development and climate financing is currently at the forefront, especially in the run up to COP29, COP30 and to the 2025 FfD4 Conference in Seville. However, the international community lacks widely shared and adapted measures that could form the foundation of a comprehensive global policy in this area, particularly through precise eligibility standards, target-setting, and tracking progress. Despite its recognized limitations, Official Development Assistance (ODA) remains by far the most well-known and used metric, particularly in public and democratic debates.


The “Total Official Support for Sustainable Development” (TOSSD) and the various climate finance aggregates have more recently been added to the toolkit used by the development community. However, so far, these measures have not resulted in a standardized, clarified, and complementary framework that could support a comprehensive global public policy and the clear set of incentives linked to it.


This Policy Paper revisits these various concepts to outline a series of proposals and directions for evolving towards a coherent architecture for measuring development financing.