The politics of accountability in South-South development cooperation

Emerging economies from the Global South, including China, India, Brazil and many others, have become important actors in the field of international development in the last two decades. Southern development cooperation providers, as they are called, are now part of the global development cooperation landscape, practicing not traditional Official Development Assistance (ODA or aid) but something else: South-South development cooperation (SSC).

My research investigates how accountability in SSC has become a problem or an issue for political and policy actors to be acted upon and how is the growing need to justify SSC manifesting and through which means.

The research uses three emblematic ‘SSC protagonists’ as exemplary sites for investigation: Brazil, China and India. As SSC keeps expanding, materially, politically and symbolically, led by rising powers like Brazil, China and India, there is growing pressure on Southern providers’ governments to justify development cooperation flows and their results to a range of domestic and transnational stakeholders. These emerging accountability politics, as referred to here, are worth studying and understanding in their own
terms.

The research seeks to provide a panorama of contemporary forms global and domestic negotiations over what accountability means and how it should be practiced in the field of SSC. It sheds lights on emerging disputes over how to measure SSC, to count and quantify its flows and to assess its development impact on the ground, particularly in the context of a global effort to achieve the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development (also called the Sustainable Development Goals – SDGs). Rather than technical matters,
measurement-related disputes reveal unfolding negotiations over power, status, recognition and over global responsibilities on a shifting multipolar, and even post-Western, world.

Negotiations over how to measure SSC also reveals tensions, dilemmas and anxieties in traditional development providers (advanced economies belonging to the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development – OECD-DAC) on how to deal with rising powers and how to bring them closer to the existing agreements and expectations on ‘proper development cooperation provider/donor’ behaviour forged within the OECD-DAC since the 1960s. At the same, negotiations over measurement reveal a set of policy and political tensions, dilemmas and anxieties within rising powers about the purposes, the costs and the benefits of working to promote development abroad.

As such, while looking at emerging forms of disputes and negotiations over accountability in SSC, in countries like Brazil, China and India, this research unpacks a range of policy and political debates over changing North-South politics and geopolitical configurations, over shifting conceptions and approaches to do development and development cooperation, and over shifting domestic foreign policymaking dynamics and state-society relations inside ‘rising powers in international development’ in the 21st
century.