The setting
Behavioral Exchange is the field's flagship global conference, and BX2025 marked the first time it had been hosted in the MENA region. UAE Aid and the Office of Development Affairs opened the conference's second day with the New Frontiers roundtable, convening senior leaders from government, philanthropy, multilaterals, academia, and delivery organizations for a closed session on international development. Behavioral Exchange gathers the discipline; the roundtable asked what it owes to development specifically.
The discussion
Speakers made the case that behavioral evidence belongs at the center of how development is designed and delivered, not added at the end. Across health, agriculture, philanthropy, and humanitarian response, the same pattern recurred: programs with strong evidence behind them still fall short when they don't account for how people actually decide and act. Participants also pointed to how fragmented the field remains - organizations working on similar problems in different sectors and regions, with little systematic exchange between them.
The outcome
That fragmentation was the argument for a network. The roundtable closed with the launch of GBEND, founded to connect these organizations around a common agenda and to build behavioral evidence where development actually happens.
