Global development is a term that is increasingly referred to, yet is often conflated with international development and is used with different implicit meanings. This paper outlines reasons for moving beyond international development, before distinguishing between global development as ‘vertical’ scale and as ‘horizontal’ scope. As a strand of development focusing on common issues, the former co-exists in parallel with sovereign (national development) and foreign (international development) issues. The latter involves an overarching paradigm, taking in interconnected as well as shared issues anywhere. It is a successor to international development and goes beyond a focus only on the Global South to encompass development issues anywhere. Global development as scope thus explicitly goes beyond the North-South binary and is argued to represent a greater fit with contemporary development opportunities and challenges.