South-South Cooperation from the
BRICS: new paradigms and old practices?
Lizbeth Navas-Alemán and Alex Shankland
IDS Rising Powers in International Development Programme
BRICS e a Cooperação Sul-Sul: O Futuro da Cooperação
Internacional para o Desenvolvimento
BRICS Policy Centre, Rio de Janeiro
26 October 2012
Understanding the impact of the BRICS on
What is it?
international development cooperation
Dissolving What
imagined
geographies
is it?
Eyben and Savage (forthcoming): Emerging and Submerging
Powers at the Busan High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness:
How the South Has Split into Two and Nobody Wants to be
in the North Any More
• The consolidation of the BRICS bloc as a symptom of dissolving imagined
geographies: no convincing abstract rationale, but the bloc has survived
and thrived while others have faltered because it doesn’t have to justify
why it exists by any rigid rationale of global division.
• The impossibility of legitimacy: dissolving imagined geographies mean
that any bloc that seeks such justification these days is doomed to fail;
geographical as well as economic size (países baleia) makes BRICS
impossible to ignore, and they demand a voice – but once they get it
they don’t always know who they’re speaking for, or what to say.
• Development cooperation as a safe space for negotiations among (rising)
powers that have more contradictions than commonalities?
Reimagining development
What is it? cooperation?
• Old paradigm: Aid and Trade are separate
• New paradigm: They are part of the same relationship
• Old paradigm: Harmonisation of Aid delivery
• New paradigm: “Free market”, the partner decides. Buyer’s market!
• Old paradigm: Aid doesn’t require reciprocity but creates inferiority
• New paradigm: Aid doesn’t create inferiority but it creates obligation
• Old paradigm: Aid creates high transaction costs (compliance costs)
• New paradigm: “Zero” conditionality
New paradigms:
What isAid
it? and Trade
• Old paradigm: Aid and Trade are separate
• New paradigm: They are part of the same relationship
– China: MOFCOM leads the coordination of flows to developing
countries…but the role of the Chinese private sector is more
complex and independent than previously thought
– Brazil: ABC only deals with ‘official’ technical cooperation but all
the other kinds of cooperation (Industrial, investment, etc) have
different organisational leads
New paradigms:What
Harmonisation
v. markets
is it?
• Old paradigm: Harmonisation of Aid delivery
• New paradigm: “Free market”, the partner decides.
Buyer’s market!
– African governments have options (Traditional vs Rising Powers)
– Unexpected shifts in loyalties and preferences
– Harmonisation of anti-corruption practices by traditional donors:
Values-based or competitiveness-based strategy?
New paradigms:
and the Gift
What Aid
is it?
• Old paradigm: Aid doesn’t require reciprocity but creates
inferiority
• New paradigm: Aid doesn’t create inferiority but it creates
obligation
• Aid as the “ruler’s gift”: who is the audience of the gift – recipient or
constituency? Or other rulers?
• Russia: the gift as existential necessity
• The self-interested gift: using other people’s countries to train our
people (SENAI example – how different from Northern practice?)
• The knowledge gift: how different from the money gift? If it doesn’t
require reciprocity of learning, then it’s constructing inferiority –
when has Brazil learned from a LIC?
New paradigms:
Zero
conditionality?
What
is it?
• Old paradigm: Aid creates high transaction costs (compliance costs)
• New paradigm: “Zero” conditionality
“We each bring our experience as a developing country... we are not trying to
impose our views. It is a conversation. We are not trying to tell them what to do.
We are not arrogant” (South Africa-based Brazilian diplomat interviewed by IPS for
Guardian article, April 2011)
• From demand-driven to cooperação estruturante?
• From insisting on sovereignty to understanding the diversity of
interests within a partner country?
• As the level of investment grows, so does the temptation to impose
conditionalities
• Compliance as a two-way street: who holds the BRICS (and their
bank) to account?
Conclusions: from discourses to practices
What is it?
Homogeneous discourses, heterogenous practices
Understanding whether or not a new paradigm is emerging
requires us to shift focus from discourse to practice
Conclusions:
the new
What
is it?and the old
Towards a research agenda
• Imaginaries of the other in development cooperation
• Practices and power
• Agency:
– of the “recipients” (elite and subtaltern)
– of the front-line practitioners
– of the actors of Old Aidland (with the Götterdämmerung of
the DAC, everything is up for grabs – from Götterdämmerung
to Gattopardo?)
For more
information...
What
is it?
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RPID website:
http://www.ids.ac.uk/idsproject/rising-powers-in-internationaldevelopment
Associated programmes for sector work:
Social Protection: Centre for Social Protection
(www.ids.ac.uk/go/csp)
Health: Future Health Systems Consortium
(www.futurehealthsystems.org)
Agriculture: Future Agricultures Consortium
(www.future-agricultures.org/research/brics)