Some time ago now I wrote a post which raised some questions about how the decision of the UK government to redirect a large slice of ‘development aid’-related funding to the science budget, primarily through the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), might play itself out over the course of time. Well, this question is already a live public one – Eleni Courea at Research Fortnight has a concise account of how both the GCRF and the Newton Fund are currently subject to debate amongst academics, politicians, and NGOs concerning the degree to which the aims of those schemes can be justified. There is a much larger story here, I should say, and perhaps the terms of the debate summarised in this piece might well be challenged. Noel Castree’s comment at the end of this piece – concerning the implied paternalism regarding British expertise that is sometimes associated with these schemes – captures much of what I suspect many people worry about. I should say also that the Newton Fund project that I am involved in aims to address precisely that worry. Basically, a good lesson to remember is that you should never trust people who claim to be able to mobilise ‘science’ in order to ‘solve’ what are too glibly called ‘global’ problems.