*By Asier Hernando, Lourdes Huanca, and Sofía Sprechmann Sineiro, Permanent Latin American Forum for the Decolonization of Cooperation.
For years we’ve talked about reforming international cooperation. About improving it. About making it more efficient, more inclusive, more local. And yet every crisis seemed to confirm that the changes were not enough. The same questions kept resurfacing: who decides, who funds, who defines the priorities, and who has the legitimacy to speak about the future of our societies.
The current crisis in international aid has placed these questions at the center of the debate. Abrupt funding cuts, program closures, and the retreat of many donors have generated uncertainty for thousands of organizations and communities. But they have also made something deeper visible: we are not facing a financial crisis alone. We are facing the crisis of a cooperation model that has carried profound power asymmetries for decades.
It was precisely in this context that the Permanent Forum on the Decolonization of International Cooperation was born — as a space for construction. It is a place where organizations, social movements, networks, academics, and activists from Latin America collectively imagine what should come next.
From the start, the Forum understood that criticizing the current model was not enough. Alternatives needed to be proposed. And for that, it chose the path of collective construction. For over a year, dozens of organizations and individuals have taken part in dialogues, debates, consultations, and reflections that have given shape to a shared vision. This is not a document written by experts, nor a proposal designed by a single organization — it is a plural construction, nourished by diverse experiences, different trajectories, and, at times, by productive disagreements.
Out of this process is emerging what we call the Solidarity-Based Cooperation Paradigm — a paradigm that proposes shifting cooperation’s center of gravity from aid toward solidarity, from dependency toward autonomy, from resource transfer toward the construction of fairer, more reciprocal, and more transformative relationships.
Solidarity, in this vision, is neither charity nor benevolence. It is the recognition that we live in a deeply interdependent world, and that the challenges we face — inequality, climate change, conflict, migration, democratic erosion — demand shared responsibility. It also means recognizing that knowledge, capacities, and solutions exist across all territories, and that cooperation must stop organizing itself around hierarchies between those who teach and those who learn, those who fund and those who execute. One of the most valuable aspects of this process has been precisely the path traveled — because the Forum is not only proposing a new paradigm, it is trying to build it the same way it hopes cooperation itself will work in the future: through dialogue, listening, diversity of voices, and collective construction.
There is still much to do. The paradigm will continue to be debated, enriched, and validated by actors from Latin America and beyond. But something important has already happened. At a moment when many feel uncertain about the future of international cooperation, hundreds of organizations are showing that imagining alternatives is also possible. The challenge is not to save a system showing clear signs of exhaustion — it is to build a new one.
Our process will reach a particularly significant moment in November, when we will publicly present the Solidarity-Based Cooperation Paradigm from Chiloé, in southern Chile. This is no casual choice. Chiloé is the territory where one of the voices that has most inspired the Forum’s reflections lives: Francisca Rodríguez Huerta, historic peasant leader, founder of ANAMURI, and a reference figure within La Vía Campesina — who has spent decades defending principles that resonate deeply with our proposal: peoples’ sovereignty, reciprocity, care for the commons, territorial autonomy, and the collective construction of alternatives. From Chiloé we want to launch this paradigm to the world — not as a finished product, but as an invitation to rethink international cooperation from the territories, from the communities, and from the voices that for far too long have been heard less than they deserve. From that corner of the south, our aim is to inspire, dialogue, and influence global debates on the future of cooperation.