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In one of the most consequential outcomes of this year’s Hamburg Sustainability Conference (HSC), the South North Commission on Development was formally launched on the gathering’s second day. Co-chaired by former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and former President of Costa Rica Laura Chinchilla, the body’s mission is to rewrite how the world understands cooperation between the Global South and North.
The independent commission will bring together up to 20 commissioners, drawn from politics, business, labour, academia, international organisations and civil society — with a majority from the Global South — and will treat development finance, climate, debt, trade and conflict as interconnected challenges rather than separate silos.
The commission has been tasked with answering a set of difficult questions, German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development Reem Alabali Radovan said: what an effective and genuinely cooperative international order should look like in the 21st century, how to ensure an ambitious successor framework to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and how institutions and partnerships need to change to make that vision real.
“...the countries of Global South today hold majority of the United Nations. They are home to over 80 per cent of world’s population and they have driven more than two-thirds of global economic growth. Yet these dynamics are not adequately reflected in many of our international fora and this must change,” said Radovan.
The commission is expected to present an interim report in 2027 and a final report by the end of 2028.
The commission’s launch comes at a moment when the rules-based multilateral order, trade rules and norms that has underpinned global cooperation since the post-war era, is under mounting strain.
Scholz pointed to a legacy the commission intends to build on: the consecutive G20 presidencies held by Indonesia, India, Brazil, and South Africa in recent years. “I think we should study intensely all the outcomes which were produced by the four countries leading the G20,” he said, calling for those gains to feed into the commission’s work.
He flagged debt as one of the commission’s most urgent fiscal questions. Many developing countries remain burdened by debt, that Scholz said was partly a legacy of past mistakes that led to mechanisms like the Paris Club, but also newer problems that the ‘G20 Common Framework for Debt’ has failed to resolve, he said.
Trade fairness was another priority the co-chairs raised, particularly around critical minerals and raw materials: rather than treating resource-rich developing countries merely as sites of extraction, they suggested exploring ways to enable first-stage refinement to happen locally, creating a real chance for growth in those economies.
Most of the world’s industrial production now happens in the Global South, Schloz noted, and it is time to find a way toward better cooperation on trade, fiscal questions, climate change and industrialisation between North and South — one rooted in multi-polarity and structured as a win-win for everyone, rather than a zero-sum contest. He added that proposals from the commission on these fronts “would be very helpful for a pragmatic cooperation in the world.”
Beyond debt and trade, they added, the commission would also need to grapple with artificial intelligence (AI) and climate change even as hunger persists globally.
Part of the commission’s task will be to redefine what ‘South’ and ‘North’ — the terms that have shaped global development policy for decades — mean. The term ‘Global South’ WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala argued, was “very convenient”, and the commission needs to interrogate it rather than take it for granted. Speaking on a panel discussion, she questioned whether the interests of emerging economies genuinely align with those of the world’s poorest developing countries, warning that the label could be concealing tough differences that make finding common solutions harder.
Scholz also argued that neither category is as homogenous as the labels suggest, and that any serious attempt at reform must start by interrogating the categories themselves.
Meanwhile, Okonjo-Iweala pushed for the same rigour on trade. Twelve months from now, Okonjo-Iweala said, she expects another hard question to have been asked and answered, with real solutions in place: why do countries that try to add value to their products keep running into escalatory tariffs? The more value they add, she explained, the higher the tariffs imposed, blocking them from selling value-added goods and, in turn, making it impossible to create jobs or build manufacturing capacity.
The commission’s broader ambition, Chinchilla said, is to move past the donor-recipient framework that has long defined North-South relations.
Drawing on Costa Rica’s own trajectory, from what she called “one of the poor colonies in the Americas” to one of the world’s full democracies, she argued that a rules-based multilateral order had once created the right incentives for smaller nations to thrive, helping them compete in global markets through WTO rules. That same system, she warned, now appears to be unravelling.
She pointed to demographics and resources like critical reserves, rare earth minerals, and clean energy raw materials as reasons the Global South’s leverage has fundamentally shifted. Nearly 90 per cent of the Global South’s population is under 30, she noted, and the region now holds significant reserves of the critical minerals and rare earths needed for the energy transition.
Meanwhile, when asked about her expectations from the commission, South African Minister for Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation Maropene Lydia Ramokgopa brought the conversation back to a concrete obstacle: domestic resource mobilisation. Developing countries, particularly across Africa, need stronger governance structures to generate their own resources, she said and identified illicit financial flows as one of the biggest issues limiting this. The commission should look into “how do we better come up with a mechanism that will allow the South and the North to be able to cooperate” to curbing this.
The two-day sustainability conference saw a gathering of around 1,600 participants from 115 countries — including German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, 22 ministers, 13 high-level representatives of international organisations, and more than 280 executives from the private sector.