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 Janeiro26 October 2012

What is it?Understanding the impact of the BRICS on international development cooperation

What 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?

Dissolving imagined geographies

What is it?

• 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

Reimagining development cooperation?

What is it?

• 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: Aid and Trade

What 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: Harmonisation v. markets

What 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: Aid and the Gift

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?

New paradigms: Zero conditionality?

What is it?

Homogeneous discourses, heterogenous practices

Conclusions: from discourses to practices

Understanding whether or not a new paradigm is emerging requires us to shift focus from discourse to practice

What is it?

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?)

Conclusions: the new and the old

What is it?RPID mailing list signup:

rpid@ids.ac.uk

RPID website:

http://www.ids.ac.uk/idsproject/rising-powers-in-international-development

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)

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