The contrast between Northern development and Southern cooperation does not fixate the terms according to which such relations unfold, but is itself a stake in this global battleground. Even though the self representations of South-South cooperation draw heavily on oppositional claims vis-à-vis Northern development aid, they cannot avoid unfolding in the ambit of the global apparatus consolidated under Northern hegemony: especially the United Nations, but also the Bretton Woods institutions and, more recently, other fora like the World Trade Organization. Since decolonization of the world’s peripheries invariably took the nation-state form and immediately ushered into an era of gradually increasing and liberalized global trade, the South could never have emerged as an external entity standing in symmetrical opposition to the North. Ultimately, then, the North-South divide is itself over-codified by Northern hegemonic forms; talks of South-South cooperation being “hijacked” by Northern institutions are therefore idle in a sense. To what extent, then, would the recent rise of South-South cooperation imply a re-politicization of global development?fieldwork, and which appeared to be so particular to Brazil, eventually turned out to be more broadly shared not only by other emergent donors, but also by Northern-led multilateral agencies. Today, South-South Cooperation has a bureaucratized version partly “owned – and some critics would say hijacked – by international agencies” . Indeed, it is where South-South cooperation meets the latter that its oppositional elements are most visibly watered down or translated as complementarity, for instance in terms of technical expertise better suited to problems supposedly shared by the global South.
Similarly, when Brazil’s South-South cooperation discourse is uttered within the orbit of the World Bank or U.N. agencies,flower buckets wholesale or in triangulations with Northern donors, claims that throughout its decades as a recipient of foreign aid Brazil would have learned how not to provide it tend to be diluted or altogether cut off. Re-politicization also operates unevenly across the global development and governance apparatus. More than the Bretton Wood institutions or the WTO, for instance, the United Nations has been perceived as a receptive forum for advancing the interests of non-hegemonic nations. Indeed, much of Brazil’s recent impulse towards South-South alignments has to do with gathering allies to strengthen its own position within that institution. As remarked, a first test has been recently passed: José Graziano da Silva’s election as director-general of the U.N.’s FAO in June 2011. Many of the cooperation agents and institutions I interacted with during fieldwork were engaged in his campaign, and some have singled out his victory as an effect of Brazil’s renewed cooperation efforts. But even the U.N.’s legitimacy as a neutral and equitable forum is tainted by the power asymmetry crystallized in the Security Council.The Council’s architecture has been for long criticized by Brazil and other non-permanent member countries for its arguably outdated structure: the world order has changed since World War II, they claim, and so must the Security Council. This was a common view among my field interlocutors, and the most frequently remarked foreign policy agenda behind Brazil’s South-South cooperation has been precisely the country’s bid for a permanent seat in the Council – one of the priorities of President Lula’s Foreign Minister, Celso Amorim. Brazil is not alone in this quest, and neither is it a new one. During the 1920’s, it pursued a permanent seat in the Council of the League of Nations, and when the creation of the UN Security Council was being negotiated between Eastern and Western powers, Brazil also pressed for inclusion.
This search for international recognition can be regarded as part of a longstanding expectation, widespread in the consciousness of many Brazilians and perhaps even more of its diplomats, that the country will one day play a prominent part in the concert of nations. The almost mythical motto “Brazil, the country of the future”encapsulates the “excess of future” that, Santos suggests, stems from Brazil’s unique history of double colonization first by a subaltern colonizer, and then by Western imperialist powers . It is indeed remarkable how, historically, this expectation to recognized global prominence has held sway even in the absence of a strong economic and military foundation comparable to that of the U.S.. Brazil’s recent foreign policy shift towards the global South may be also regarded as part of this age-old expectation: by becoming a provider of international cooperation, Brazil is addressing as much its Southern counterparts as Northern powers, from whom it seeks recognition as a major global player. Brazil’s quest for recognition has therefore never implied a break with its historical alignment with the West. In the post-Cold War world, it has engaged in North-South oppositional politics only up to a point – for instance, in negotiations on trade and intellectual property rights. Brazil’s cotton dispute with the U.S. at the WTO and its struggle to defend compulsory licensing of antiretroviral pharmaceutics became famous examples of such global “activism”. In these and other disputes, Brazil is indeed challenging powerful players, but within rules and norms that have been largely crafted by them. Similarly, much of oppositional politics by Brazil and others has aimed at enhancing their position within these multilateral fora, more than providing alternatives to them. Along with others in the global South , emerging donors have brought about the standoffs in agricultural trade and climate talks throughout the 2000’s. They have been gradually enhancing their financial contributions to the Bretton Woods institutions, and in 2012 for the first time all candidates to the presidency of the World Bank had come from the global South.
In response to Europe and the U.S.’s resistances to open up these institutions, the BRICS have ventilated proposals to create their own version of the World Bank, or to replace the dollar-based global trade system with a multi-currency system. At this point, we can only guess about the ways and the extent to which the emerging multi-polarity of which Brazil and other new donors are a major expression would be destabilizing the global balance of forces that prevailed during the last century. In February 2011, I attended a lecture at the University of Legon in Accra where the speaker – a Ghanaian Law professor based in the U.S. – challenged the link between the TRIPS and the WTO, that is, between the requirement to enforce intellectual property rights and the right of African countries to trade freely. After a few minutes of debate, the host put a question everyone seemed to be waiting for: “that is all very well, but, if China does not care [about enforcing intellectual property rights], why should we?” This encapsulates a couple of key questions that may be raised a propos the growing importance of emerging donors especially in Sub-Saharan Africa: what kind of leverage are these new powers providing to those in countries highly dependent on foreign aid, in their dealings with Northern donors? Or, conversely, how are emerging donors accommodating on a historical layer sedimented during decades of hegemony by former colonizers and Cold War geopolitics – or, in the case of Africa,flower harvest buckets on long-standing extraversion processes ?Just as Brazilian commercial missions to Africa in the sixties and seventies landed somewhat inadvertently amidst an oligopolistic environment dominated by former European metropolises and later newcomers such as the U.S., Japan and countries from the Soviet bloc , so is contemporary Brazilian cooperation making its way into a terrain shaped by decades of development aid and, in the last years, by an “extraordinary explosion in the number of aid actors and programmes” . This includes not just newcomers from the global South, but new, public and private, organizations from the global North, from tiny “backyard” NGOs to massive private foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: a process of “NGO-ization” which some have associated with the effects of neoliberal reforms in Africa . At a local scale, this is a highly populated environment that may translate at times into cooperation and complementarities, at times into jealousies and competition. While some bilateral and multilateral donors have actively sought triangulation with Brazilian cooperation, pioneer front liners have told me about the resistances they encountered when trying to network their way into the local development environment in Africa, especially by established Northern agencies and agents. Conversely, it is not evident that Brazilians will always be willing to share credit for cooperation initiatives with other donors either. On the ground, simultaneous and sometimes overlapping cooperation projects from various agencies, North and South, not rarely dispute the interest and commitment of individual actors – who, in the case of Embrapa’s partners to be focused on here, come in limited numbers. Indeed, even though development cooperation is generally approached as an international affair, politics at national and sub-national scales are key to understanding it.
The next section will suggest some of the ways in which the hemispheric politics of emerging donors discussed in this section may relate to domestic processes among providers and recipients of South-South cooperation.My field observations generally concur with Mawdsley’s remark that, by and large, the politicization emerging donors bring to the global scale is not reflected in their “sub-national politics of development” . On the one hand, emerging donors usually have little to say about domestic politics in recipient countries; on the other, their own domestic cooperation politics has, at least for the moment, little robustness and visibility. In the first case, as Mawdsley argued for emerging donors at large, by working through established political and bureaucratic elites in recipient countries, they don’t do much to help local publics hold the latter accountable. In the case of Brazil, domestic politics indeed seems to be, even if by default, something left for its local partners to deal with. This has been the stance, for instance, in more controversial cooperation initiatives such as the ProSavannah in Mozambique , which allowed Brazilians to sidestep concerns raised by civil society groups such as peasant organizations. In this, emerging donors are reproducing the double standard historically deployed by their Northern counterparts, who have selectively engaged with, and sometimes plainly ignored, principles and rules of their own creation. If, for instance, the South-South principle of mutual non-interference came into being as a reaction against a past history of having been intervened upon , on the other it serves as a convenient smokescreen for unpopular stances that make, nonetheless, geopolitical or commercial sense. This principle was repeatedly deployed, for instance, to justify Brazil’s indirect backing of the South African apartheid government in U.N. votes during the seventies . Something similar could be said of the emerging donors’ reluctance to fully commit to principles of the Aid Effectiveness Agenda, whose agreed principles include ownership, harmonization, mutual accountability, use of recipient country’s own systems, and untying aid.While Brazilian cooperation encourages recipient countries’ ownership and refuses conditionalities, as almost everyone else it is less willing to harmonize its projects with other donors, and some of its cooperation programs have involved something like tied aid.This ambivalence has also allowed emerging donors to avoid difficult, and resource demanding, issues like accountability and transparency in the provision of cooperation. A country like China, in many ways an exception in this already highly heterogeneous group, might afford to disregard such demands more than others – although even it has been more forthcoming in making its cooperation data public. But even in constitutional democracies more vulnerable to international opinion like Brazil, unless domestic constituencies decide to push governments in these directions, this kind of pressure from the development community is likely to fall on deaf years. Indeed, low awareness and involvement by domestic publics in South-South cooperation seem to be a general trend among emerging donors . Indeed, and contrastively to the growing interest in them shown by the international media and the development community at large,Brazil’s and others’ rising profile as providers of cooperation has been either ignored or taken for granted by the domestic public. This has a few consequences, which I will outline here based on the case of Brazil. Firstly, in contrast with their Northern counterparts who have to continually justify and account for the expenditure of part of their national budget in foreign aid, most governments in the South do not face a significant domestic constituency interested in this question.