On 7 June 2026, CIIP's Jonathan Chan moderated a Lunch and Learn session for the Temasek Trust Collective featuring Professor Dean Karlan titled ‘Hope without the Hype: An Evidence-Focused Path Forward for Foreign Aid and Philanthropy’. Professor Karlan served as USAID's Chief Economist from 2022 to 2025, leading the agency's push to embed rigorous evidence into foreign aid decision-making — and watched that institutional infrastructure be dismantled in real time. He is a development economist at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, co-founder of the Global Poverty Research Lab, and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action. 

Insights from CIIP’s recent report 'Climate Adaptation and Resilience in Asia' helped to provide context for the session, highlighting shifts in the official development assistance (ODA) landscape for climate finance in Asia. In addition to the United States, there have been substantial cuts to ODA budgets in other top funders, including France, Germany, and the UK, with reallocations to defence, security, and domestic economic issues. These portend major shifts in Asia, from aid to development finance, in the integration of local economy solutions for inclusive capacity building, an increased role for private and philanthropic capital, and Asia-led initiatives for climate finance and regional cooperation.

Professor Karlan drew on this context to illustrate key principles that remain concerning evidence-based approaches to allocations of aid funding for interventions and programmes. Arguing that the goal of aid and impact investing should be to strengthen local capacity and generate durable societal impact, Prof. Karlan addressed the need to channel resources in ways that build state capacity, crowd in larger domestic budgets, and support long-term self-sufficiency.

Evidence and measurement are crucial to this effort. Prof Karlan argued that impact investing has often been weaker than aid and philanthropy in rigorously measuring outcomes. He highlighted the importance of counterfactual thinking and evidence to avoid the misattribution of outcomes to an intervention and, amid shrinking budgets, to ensure that what is being funded actually works.

Amid growing pressures on foreign aid, Prof. Karlan emphasised principles such as the need to use or produce evidence, differentiating marketing and substance, being honest about trade-offs, and the importance of localisation and contextualisation. He concluded by emphasising the need for epistemic, institutional, and rhetorical humility before addressing questions about randomised control trials, philanthropy coalitions, and the pulse of the development space.

We are grateful to Prof. Karlan and his team for their substantial insights and look forward to building strong partnerships across funders to address social, environmental, and climate goals.