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About the author
Paulo Esteves is Professor of International Relations at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. Dr Esteves is the current Director of the Institute of International Relations (PUC-Rio) and the General Supervisor of the BRICS Policy Center. His current research focuses on the intersections between the fields of international security, humanitarianism, and development, as well as the role of Brazil and other rising powers in these fields.
João Fonseca is an Associate Researcher at the BRICS Policy Center, and, since June 2015, has been working with the World Bank in Mozambique as a Natural Resource Management Specialist. Before moving to Mozambique, he worked as country coordinator for the Brazilian Agency for Cooperation (ABC) in Tanzania. His interests include issues related to development, environmental and natural resource management, and South-South cooperation, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Summary
International development cooperation is undergoing deep transformations, driven by a diversification in terms of actors, types of development finance flows, and changing power relations. Development cooperation agencies from Development Assistance Committee countries face intensifying competitive pressures, and seek to regain balance by quickly adapting their practices and institutional frameworks. The new configurations and power relations within this changing landscape raise new questions about the long-term viability of these arrangements.
The increased visibility of South-South cooperation reflects these changes. Although cooperation among developing countries is not a recent phenomenon, over the last fifteen years development cooperation between countries of the global South has increased dramatically. The current wave of South-South cooperation is partly a result of emerging powers’ more active economic and political participation in international relations, but it is also a product of the disillusionment with, and exhaustion of, development models promoted by the North.
This book offers an analytical overview of the historical paths of South-South cooperation, understood as an international institution, as well as comparisons across the concrete practices, interrogating how these practices reinforce and transform the meanings and outcomes of this institution. In addition to clarifying the logics driving current development cooperation practices from an academic standpoint, the analysis provided in the book will have direct relevance to the field of development policy, since it will elucidate variations and configurations in development cooperation.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Development Studies, Politics and International Relations, as well as those working in the field of development policy.
