Three people in hats and rubber boots navigate a muddy tidal mangrove forest in Bahía Málaga, Colombia, balancing on a dense labyrinth of exposed aerial roots beneath a canopy of slender tree trunks.

Imagining International Development in A Multipolar World

Posted by jfrant

“We are going to have a multi-polar sustainable development world. It’s not going to be led perhaps by the United States or by some of the traditional actors.”

That’s how Jeffrey Sachs reflects, in his recent video, on the sudden collapse of many U.S.-funded development programs and the broader geopolitical realignment underway. But how will that realignment play out in practice for international development?

Sachs points to large-scale regional initiatives like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which unites 55 countries around shared economic goals. He sees momentum building across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. He also praises China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an ambitious effort to link infrastructure and investment projects across continents.

While Sachs “admires” the BRI, I view it with more caution. The initiative has undoubtedly reshaped global development finance—but often at the cost of saddling countries with unsustainable debt, locking them into opaque agreements, and emphasizing extractive infrastructure over inclusive, community-driven growth. Development that mortgages the future in service of the present is not development worth celebrating.

Still, Sachs is right about the bigger picture. Even as initiatives like the BRI draw critique, they exemplify a broader shift: the world is no longer waiting for traditional donors to lead. Sachs’ observation reflects not only a change in geopolitical dynamics, but also a loosening of the development script—one no longer authored exclusively by the familiar cast of Western donors and Bretton Woods institutions. Countries are forging new alliances, testing new platforms, and imagining new paradigms.

The landscape for non-state international development finance is also shifting. A vital but often overlooked source of development finance is remittances—money sent home by migrants and diaspora communities. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the potential of the “migrant transnational class” to drive rural development through remittances and social capital, focusing on return migration in Mexico. That research explored how remittances improve livelihoods, fund education, and support local businesses—not just as financial transfers, but as part of a broader ecosystem of transnational engagement. In many regions, they have long outstripped foreign aid in both volume and impact.

That lifeline is now under threat, at least for U.S.-based remitters. As part of the Trump administration’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” the U.S. government has proposed a new federal tax on all remittances sent abroad—effectively taxing migrant families twice. In 2024 alone, sub-Saharan Africa received nearly $10 billion in remittances from the U.S.—a figure nearly on par with the total foreign assistance it received before the Trump-era cuts. Countries like Gambia, Liberia, and Senegal, where remittances make up a significant portion of national income, would be especially hard hit (New York Times, June 3, 2025).

Another notable trend is the growing influence of private wealth in shaping the development agenda. States and multilateral institutions have historically dominated this space. While a few large philanthropies—most notably the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—have had outsized impact in areas like global health, their overall scale has not yet matched that of state-backed finance.

But that balance may be shifting. As private fortunes—particularly those built in the tech sector—continue to grow, a new class of philanthropic actors is emerging. This trend is likely to accelerate as a handful of major companies consolidate control over the development of frontier Generative AI models, further concentrating global wealth and influence in an already narrow segment of society. This concentration not only shapes who builds the tools of the future—but also who sets the ethical guardrails and development priorities surrounding them. Some, like those aligned with Founders Pledge, are optimistic that tech entrepreneurs can become a transformative force in global development. As the organization puts it: “In our vision of the future, the value created by technology benefits those who need it most.”

Yet not all tech billionaires are channeling their influence in support of international development. Elon Musk, despite being the world’s richest individual, was a driving force behind blanket cuts to U.S. foreign aid—a stark reminder that private wealth is not inherently aligned with global development goals.

While private capital can certainly catalyze innovation, it also risks entrenching the very power imbalances development is meant to dismantle. And unlike centralized agencies such as USAID—which, for all their flaws, offer unified leadership, institutional memory, and a coherent development philosophy—philanthropic giving led by individuals is inherently more fragmented. Its goals, methods, and ideologies vary widely from donor to donor, making it harder to ensure consistent priorities or align efforts across sectors and regions.

In short, development finance in a multipolar world will be messy. With power dispersed across regional blocs, diaspora networks, corporate actors, and tech philanthropists—each with competing priorities and asymmetrical resources—the international development landscape is becoming less hierarchical and more contested. This pluralism presents both opportunities and risks. It opens the door to more locally rooted, innovative approaches, but also raises the specter of incoherence, duplication, and unaccountable influence.

As we enter this new era, goals, methods, and ideologies will continue to diverge—mirroring the broader dispersion of influence in the global order. The challenge will be to embrace this multiplicity without losing sight of shared values, and to cultivate mechanisms that enable alignment when necessary, while leaving space for difference and disruption where it matters most.

Why “Secondhand Worlds”?

Posted by jfrant

I named this blog after a line from C. Wright Mills’ 1960 essay The Cultural Apparatus, which I first read in 2008 during a journalism school class at the University of Colorado:

“The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced; and their own experience is always indirect. The quality of their lives is determined by meanings they have received from others.”

That quote has stayed with me—not just because it’s a sharp observation about how we process the world, but because it remains unsettlingly relevant. We don’t encounter reality raw; we inherit it through headlines, feeds, photos, slogans, and the countless interpretations of others. Mills called the system that produces and distributes these interpretations the “cultural apparatus.”

Back in 2008, journalism as a profession was entering a crisis that has only deepened since. The demise of local newspapers and public-interest reporting, the erosion of journalistic ethics, the rise of social media, the fragmentation of the internet, and now the explosion of AI and synthetic media—seen through the lens of C. Wright Mills, these shifts help explain much about our current moment. The cultural apparatus isn’t just evolving; it’s fragmenting, accelerating, and becoming harder to trace and trust.

Today, that apparatus is both more expansive and more manipulable than Mills could have imagined. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) deliver curated slices of experience in real time. AI-generated content blurs the line between authentic and synthetic, while billionaires, governments, and opaque algorithms shape what rises to the top. Conspiracies scale faster than facts. The experience of “seeing it with your own eyes” is often preempted by a push notification or a viral meme.

In this environment, the question isn’t whether we live in secondhand worlds—it’s who’s furnishing them, and to what end.

That’s why I started this blog. Over the years, I’ve used this space to explore those questions directly—writing about civic tech, participatory democracy, communication systems, and the ethical design of digital tools—all efforts to interrogate and influence the cultural apparatus itself. It’s a place for me to think critically about the cultural apparatus we all live within—and to make my own small contribution to it. I’ve worked in digital communications, civic tech, and democracy support. I’ve seen how narratives can be built for liberation, and how they can be weaponized. I’ve tried to help build tools and spaces that make democratic values legible, accessible, and resilient.

If we’re going to live in secondhand worlds, then let’s at least try to make them better ones—rooted in equity, truth, and human dignity.

A young green seedling with two oval cotyledons and two small serrated leaves emerging from dark, moist soil.

My Soft Career Pivot: Global Programs to Domestic Impact

Posted by jfrant

After ten years at the National Democratic Institute — in roles ranging from digital communications to project management — I was laid off. Like many others in the international development space, I was swept up in the collapse that followed the Trump administration’s elimination of U.S. foreign assistance — a move that also gutted the very institutions meant to support democratic resilience abroad.

For me, this marked the end of a decade at the National Democratic Institute. Over ten years, I served in a range of roles — from digital communications to project management — and spent the last several years as part of NDI’s DemTech team. While I wasn’t formally a team lead, I often played a leadership role in practice, especially when it came to managing complex tech implementations and coordinating with external vendors. I helped define requirements, translate between program needs and technical delivery, and make sure tools actually worked for the people using them.

That kind of continuity is rare in this field — and it has made reentering the job market unexpectedly disorienting. It meant that when the layoff came, I had been thrust into a job market I hadn’t needed to navigate in a long time. My muscle memory was gone. The terrain had changed. And so had the sector. I found myself questioning how my experience would translate to other contexts — whether a decade of work in international democracy programs, with their specific jargon and frameworks, would resonate with new employers or sectors outside that bubble. Is what I’d built still relevant — and valuable — to others?

While the sector begins to innovate and rebuild, another tsunami is underway.

The AI wave is still swelling — reshaping workflows, disrupting institutions, and raising profound questions across education, journalism, policy, and governance. Tools like ChatGPT and open-source LLMs aren’t just new technologies; they’re catalysts for rethinking how knowledge, communication, and power are structured. This future is unfolding faster than most civic institutions can respond. And the pace of deployment continues to outstrip our collective ability to govern or understand it. As someone who’s worked at the intersection of tech and democracy, I see how the rush toward AGI and rapid productization is leading many companies to underappreciate the human impacts of these tools. The people most affected — especially those already underserved — are often left out of the design process entirely. We need to re-center human consequences in this work, not treat them as edge cases or cleanup tasks.

At least in the short term, the U.S.-funded international development sector won’t bounce back. (I’ve even suggested to the director of my graduate program — Columbia SIPA’s MPA in Development Practice — that it could help reimagine what this future might look like.) So I decided to start building something different — a new way of working that still aligns with my long-term goals.

I began working as a freelance consultant. Not just as a placeholder, but as a way to work more intentionally, partnering with organizations I respect to build tools and strategies that fit this moment. Much of that work has been with domestic clients — a shift I didn’t plan, but one that’s opened new ways to apply my skills in deeply local, relevant ways. The challenges are different, but the core questions remain: who is this for, and who’s being left out?

And while “consultant” is a new title for me, the work itself isn’t unfamiliar. In fact, it feels like a natural extension of what I was already doing — just with new labels and new audiences.

In fact, much of what I’m doing now builds directly on my experience in NDI’s DemTech team, where I was often brought in midstream to help shape, fix, or redesign technology projects in motion. The teams I supported spanned regions, mandates, and technical comfort levels. I learned to enter fast, listen carefully, clarify goals, and help make messy projects functional and sustainable. That experience made me unusually comfortable with the core conditions of consulting: ambiguity, velocity, and cross-functional collaboration.

And before that, in grad school, I had dipped into consulting too — primarily building websites. It was project-based, creative, and real-world — and I loved it.

This isn’t just about helping teams with tech. It’s about helping organizations stay grounded in their values while adapting to real-world constraints — shrinking budgets, shifting priorities, and powerful new tools that are easy to misuse or misunderstand.

At the same time, I won’t pretend consulting is a guaranteed path. It’s fulfilling, but it’s also uncertain. I’m constantly juggling multiple projects, working pro bono, staying open to new collaborations, and — like many others in this space — always thinking about what’s next. For now, it’s a path I’m walking with intention — even if I don’t have all the answers yet. I’m still figuring out what this looks like long-term, and how best to align the work I care about with the evolving needs of the field. At some point, that may require a harder pivot — one that stretches beyond adjacent spaces and demands a deeper reinvention. If and when that time comes, I hope to meet it with the same clarity of purpose. In the meantime, I continue to explore full-time opportunities that align with this mission and allow me to do this work in a more sustained, strategic way.