BRICS, the southern model, and the evolving landscape of development assistance: Toward a new taxonomy

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an explosion of categories and labels to account for the expansion of forms of cooperation beyond the membership of the Development Assistance Committee. Such hype has led to the construction of the so-called southern model as the archetype of development cooperation coming from non-Development Assistance Committee countries that are somehow committed to the principles of the South-South cooperation. The present article challenges the idea of a southern model by providing an analysis of drivers, tools, and modality of development assistance.

BRICS and international development assistance Towards divergence or convergence in development assistance amongst North and South donors?

“…Contesting the analytical usefulness of the concept of southern aid, Lauria and Fumagalli () argue that although the categories DAC and non‐DAC might generally be used to describe two sets of donors, beyond membership of an OECD committee, the distinction between them is analytically imprecise. In the first instance, this is because the approach typically portrays the DAC as the normative model of development assistance and proceeds to an examination of the ways in which new forms of aid diverge from this ideal type.…”

Can BRICS De-dollarize the Global Financial System?

“…BRICS' ability to change the existing system is arguably undermined by the group's political, economic, and ideological heterogeneity (Radulescu, Panait, and Voica, 2014;Tierney, 2014;Li, 2019); the power asymmetry within BRICS (Pandit, 2019); and its lack of a collective world order vision marketable to the broader international community (Nuruzzaman, 2020). Even in development finance, which is often cited as evidence that BRICS is a counter-hegemonic group, scholars contend that the different development assistance models among individual members could weaken a coherent BRICS model (Lauria and Fumagalli, 2019). BRICS' failed attempt at creating its own credit rating agency is a demonstration of the group's limited capacity to transform the global financial order through collective institutional innovation (Helleiner and Wang, 2018).…”

Development Cooperation in the Context of Contested Global Governance

“…Moreover, actors engage in parallel platforms of global and club governance for development cooperation, sometimes in direct or indirect contestation with one another. Existing development cooperation platforms, such as the UN DCF and the GPEDC, work alongside new platforms, such as the UN High-level Political Forum and the G20 Development Group (Bracho 2021, Chapter 17;Lauria and Fumagalli 2019). Against this backdrop, we characterise the current policy field of development cooperation as being shaped by multiple sites of "contested cooperation".…”

“…In addition, neither platform provides tangible inputs to the Financing for Development Forum of the UN, the official review mechanism of SDG 17, or the High-level Political Forum-the principal institutional platform for reviewing progress towards the SDGs. Other sites of contestation include, for instance, club governance formats such as the G20 development working group, the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) (Lauria and Fumagalli 2019), the IBSA group (India, Brazil, and South Africa), and MIKTA, an informal grouping composed of Mexico, Indonesia, Korea, Turkey, and Australia formed in the margins of the UN General Assembly in 2013.…”