What Are We Trying to Save? What Are We Willing to Let Go?
The international development sector is under enormous pressure to adapt. Funding is shifting, institutions are being challenged, and long-standing assumptions about how development should work are being reconsidered. But “transformation” can easily become shorthand for trying to preserve everything we already have while making it work a little differently.
What if we asked a harder question: what is actually worth saving?
This participatory session will invite people to look across the institutions, practices, relationships, capabilities, and assumptions that make up international development and wrestle with three choices: What must we protect? What are we willing to let go? What do we need to create?
The point is not to reach consensus. In fact, the disagreements may be the most revealing part. One person's essential institution may be another person's outdated structure. A capability that many agree is vital may no longer need to sit within the organization that has historically held it. And letting go of something familiar may be necessary to make space, resources, and authority available for something new.
These choices have consequences. If we believe certain capabilities must endure, who should hold them? If institutions or practices have outlived their usefulness, what would it actually take to stop funding them? And if the sector needs new models, where should money, attention, and leadership move now?
Rather than asking how international development can survive the current disruption intact, this conversation will ask what we should intentionally carry forward into whatever comes next.
What to expect
A highly visual and participatory working session. Participants will move between small-group conversations and a collective mapping exercise, placing ideas into categories such as “protect,” “let go,” and “create.”
The group will then explore the tensions and disagreements that emerge. The aim is not to produce a neat blueprint for the future of development, but to make difficult choices more visible and create a sharper conversation about what genuine transformation requires.
Who this is for
This session is for people across philanthropy, civil society, international organizations, networks, and the wider global development ecosystem who believe the current system cannot simply continue as it is and are grappling with what meaningful transformation asks us to preserve, relinquish, and build.
What you will get out of it
A clearer view of what people across the sector believe is genuinely worth protecting
Space to challenge assumptions about institutions and practices that may no longer serve their original purpose
New perspectives on where transformation requires evolution and where it may require letting go
A collective map of what participants believe should endure, end, evolve, or emerge
Sharper questions about where funding, leadership, and attention should move next
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