Brazil's South–South development cooperation: Principles and experiences of the domestic bureaucracy

Abstract

How did Brazilian bureaucrats view President Lula's approach to the provision of development assistance in the context of South-South cooperation (SSC)? How did they see their own bureaucracy's role, as a provider of such assistance? This paper addresses these questions within the broad context of Brazil's development assistance program. The analysis begins with an elaboration of the internal legal and political structure supporting the country's provision of development assistance. Then, it addresses the research questions by drawing on original material obtained from 54 interviews, conducted in Brasilia, with diplomats and public servants from 25 federal ministries and institutions directly involved with implementing technical cooperation agreements. Evidence leads to three main observations: (a) the bureaucracies' limited autonomy vis-à-vis the Presidency's command of the Brazilian development assistance program; (b) great convergence in the worldviews and principled values upheld by public servants and diplomats in regard to Brazilian foreign policy; and (c) the existence of interbureaucracy complaints and struggles related to the operational side of agreement implementation. These findings are relevant for understanding the inner workings of Brazilian SSC, as well as in comparison to other national bureaucracies' involvement in the conceptualization and implementation of South-South knowledge transfers.

Negotiating accountability in South-South Cooperation: the case of Brazil

“…At the same time, Brazilian domestic institutions have continuously experimented with practicing international development finance, technical, and humanitarian cooperation. In many cases, doing cooperation came ahead of procedures and guidelines (Milani 2018;Farias 2018).…”

“…Brazilian technical SSC, for instance, relies on numerous public institutions and public servants who act as the 'development experts' implementing projects, either responding to the demands from Itamaraty/ ABC or following their own international agenda. ABC still faces coordination challenges and has no monopoly over all the technical cooperation provided by the country (Farias 2018). Conceived as a foreign policy instrument, development cooperation quickly became 'multiples instruments' (Leite et al 2014), serving different national public agencies in their domestic and international policy-institutional battles.…”

“…Some institutions value cooperation as part of their own efforts to internationalise Brazilgrown technologies, expose human resources to international experience, and gain legitimacy for policy narratives at home. Simultaneously, years of expanded international activism have strained implementing partners and created external (with ABC, the private sectors and/or civil society) or internal frictions (intra-institutional) due to the political, programmatic, and budgetary trade-offs Brazilian ministries are subjected to (Farias 2018).…”