FFD4 Seville: Key outcomes show some hope, but wider systems remain paralysed

The 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) came to a close in Seville, Spain, on July 3, concluding a once-in-a-decade process where countries deliberate on the challenge of financing sustainable development, facilitated by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

As the outcome document — titled Compromiso de Sevilla (Seville Commitment) — was already agreed upon prior to the conference on June 17, proceedings in Seville mainly involved plenary statements from leaders, multistakeholder roundtables on key issues and hundreds of side events. The side events in particular drew a wide spectrum of speakers, including governments, UN agencies, private finance stakeholders, civil society and academia.

On the final day, while delegates and financial system stakeholders deliberated on technical issues at side events, civil society raised chants demanding debt cancellation, climate justice, taxing the rich and system change.

Some key outcomes of Ffd4

The Seville Platform for Action was launched on Day 1 and is the implementation arm of the Seville Commitment (Compromiso de Sevilla). Over 130 voluntary initiatives were announced to implement the outcome document, aimed at helping countries mobilise resources for an increased UN-mandated Sustainable Development Goals investment push.

Though wide-ranging, the initiatives fall under three major themes that reflect the conference’s objective of reshaping the landscape of financing for development:

• Scaling up finance mobilisation and investments: New partnerships and tools were announced to unlock private capital and boost domestic resource mobilisation within countries. 

  Notable efforts in this direction include SCALED, a platform led by multiple countries to expand blended finance; FX EDGE, a set of tools created by the Inter-American Development Bank to overcome the barrier of currency volatility in foreign loans for development by facilitating more local currency financing and the Coalition for Global Solidarity Levies, which suggests taxing premium air travel and private jets to raise money for climate and development goals.

• Tackling the debt crisis: Several initiatives focused on solutions to the sovereign debt crisis, particularly unsustainable external debt for developing countries. The Global Hub for Debt Swaps for Development, launched by the Government of Spain and the World Bank, is to provide technical and financial support to countries considering ‘swapping’ their debt for food security and/or climate change adaptation. 

  The Debt Pause Clause Alliance, launched by the government of Spain with Barbados, France and others and multiple multilateral development banks (MDB), pushed for the inclusion of clauses that temporarily suspend the repayment of external debt of a country in the event of an external shock, including natural disasters, food or health emergencies.

  Notably, the Sevilla Borrower’s Forum was launched as a collective platform to bring together expertise and align negotiation efforts among borrowers, mainly from the Global South.

• Financial architecture reform: Countries and institutions committed to shifting the structures of global development finance. A key initiative in this regard is the Global Financing Playbook, which aims to foster collaboration between finance and development institutions and coordinate international support to deliver financing aligned with a country’s national priorities. 

  The Beyond GDP Global Alliance was also launched, a coalition of countries and partners advocating for the use of broader economic indicators, beyond just gross domestic product, in shaping policy and financial decisions.

Additionally, sector-specific initiatives were announced too, including several pertaining to climate-related financing. 

What was in the text? 

Unlike typical UN conferences where negotiations take centre stage, Compromiso de Sevilla was adopted ahead of FfD4 and formally endorsed during the summit. Countries instead focused on announcing the Seville Action Plan as the main path forward. Still, negotiations leading up to the Compromiso were fraught, shaped by deep power and economic imbalances that disadvantage developing countries by design.

Between July 2024 and June 2025, the co-facilitators of the FfD4 outcome document (Mexico, Nepal, Norway, and Zambia) led a drafting process, beginning with an Elements Paper informed by nearly 300 stakeholder inputs. This shaped the Zero Draft published in January 2025, followed by the First Draft in March, both refined through feedback from member states. 

Negotiations on the outcome document abruptly concluded on June 17, 2025, when the UN Preparatory Committee adopted the Compromiso. The process had been stalled by US objections, with the ‘silence procedure’ broken on nearly every paragraph. In a dramatic turn, the US withdrew from the process during the final session, clearing the way for consensus among the remaining countries.

Other Global North countries, including the EU, UK, Switzerland, Canada and Japan, dissociated from core commitments on a UN tax convention and sovereign debt mechanisms. This reflected broader resistance to shifting financial governance away from institutions dominated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or OECD.

Despite the circulation of a final draft on June 12, nearly every paragraph drew objections – revealing efforts by some states to stall progress. The final Compromiso was weakened in key areas: Language on fossil fuel subsidies was deleted, and on asset registries diluted. Commitments on international tax, investor-state dispute settlement and special drawing rights (SDR) were also watered down. In particular, the SDR section lost specific calls for IMF reforms, weakening proposals to speed up and democratise SDR allocation.

On debt architecture, while the final text retained a UN-led intergovernmental process, its mandate was diluted, prompting criticism from civil society that the softening risks undermining SDG progress amid escalating debt crises. 

Relatedly, the launch of an African Credit Rating Agency was included in the text. It aims to address unfair biases and systemic issues in the big three credit rating agencies, whose ratings contribute to the “Africa premium”, significantly increasing borrowing costs for African countries. This was welcomed by some civil society groups. 

The civil society also welcomed the inclusion of a global debt registry in the text, however, some raised concerns about it being hosted by the World Bank. The commitment calls for consolidating existing debt databases into a single global registry at the Bank to improve transparency, harmonise reporting and ease borrower burdens.

Ultimately, while the document marked some modest progress, experts like Daniela Gabor criticised it for reinforcing de-risking that benefits investors more, without meaningful safeguards. As she wrote, it failed to adopt stronger oversight, fiscal limits or protections for public services, and instead promotes vague monitoring and partnerships that risk deepening inequality.

Anxious expression of global crises

FFD4 represented a crucial moment where a multilateral process raised the issue of funding needed to achieve developing countries’ development and climate goals. In an atmosphere of aid cuts, trade tensions, growing economic nationalism in developed countries and global wars, the outlook for securing the additional financing required to build crucial infrastructure in a low-carbon, climate-resilient way is bleak at best. And in this moment, the demands placed on FFD4 to deliver vital transformations in the global finance, debt and aid architecture were lofty.

Some progress was recorded in the outcome document — offering, at best, small indicators or ‘hooks’ for civil society to push for further change in the coming months and years.

A broader trend of shifting responsibility onto the private sector to fill the infrastructure financing gap — consistent with the narratives of ‘de-risking’, ‘billions to trillions’ and ‘mobilising private capital’ of the past decade or more — was widespread in Seville. Parallel side events, separated by barely a wall, featured panel discussions of private sector representatives discussing “catalytic instruments to crowd in private capital and prove out commercial viability”, while in other rooms, civil society highlighted the “vicious cycle of debt, poverty and climate-induced crisis” and demanded transformative, not incremental, change. 

In rooms where critiques of the three big credit rating agencies (CRA) were raised by experts, representatives of the same CRAs showed up and seemingly ‘acknowledged’ the problems with subjective ratings of developing countries but offered little recourse. There was recognition in some sessions of systemic issues such as the limitations of Basel III regulations, the unwillingness of rich country central banks to rechannel Special Drawing Rights to MDBs for development financing in poorer countries and the impact of climate shocks on sovereign credit ratings.

What Seville produced was an anxious expression of global crises from developing countries and a clenched admission of the same from the rich. Everyone knew that the rules of the system are rigged against the developing world and expectations of “bankability” and profits from what should essentially be global public goods — such as low-carbon, climate-resilient infrastructure — are delusional at best. 

Some promising paragraphs in the text, a token (but important) private jet levy proposed here, a tax on the rich there, offered a few rays of hope. Beyond that, the systemic paralysis endured under the blaze of the southern Spain heatwave and the work continues to fight for a better future for 80 per cent of the world’s population.