Convened by Nadia Molenaers and Valentin Poponete, Institute of Development Policy (IOB, UAntwerpen)

Sustainability efforts play out inside messy, interdependent systems, which are influenced by feedbacks, delays, and nested wicked problems. The panel centers on the collision between (g)local realities and intensifying geopolitical pressures: great-power competition, sanctions and export controls, trade wars and supply-chain rewiring, climate/security bargains, and a donor landscape splintered by shifting risk appetites. These forces interact with recipient-country political settlements, state capacity, and social ecologies, as well as donor-home politics - elections, budget cycles, and compliance regimes - reshaping priorities, incentives, and room for maneuver. We explore how global signals land in place-specific contexts and produce uneven outcomes. Attention is placed on distributional consequences and residual risks: who gains access, who is excluded, which costs are passed to whom, and how does this affect equity and legitimacy. We highlight ripple effects and unintended consequences across the aid policy cycle -agenda-setting, modality and allocation choices, implementation and adaptation, monitoring and evaluation - showing where alignment or friction emerges between donor and recipient incentives. The panel foregrounds leverage points that can shift system behavior toward resilient sustainability: smarter coordination across fragmented donors; policy coherence between climate, trade, and security goals; risk-sharing arrangements that avoid offloading uncertainty onto the poorest; and politically feasible pathways that build on local capabilities and coalitions. By synthesizing insights across diverse contexts, the panel seeks actionable understanding of how to design and steer development cooperation that is sensitive to system dynamics, honest about power, and attentive to who benefits and who bears the residual risk in a fractured world. It asks which insights travel across contexts.