Each of these has its own experience in domestic development and/or in cooperating with foreign agencies, and for the most part they have no contact with each other. Projects will therefore vary widely, sometimes even within the same institution, as is to some extent the case of Embrapa. Besides heterogeneity, another differential effect of South-South cooperation’s organizational outlook relates to flexibility and autonomy in implementation. Mawdsley suggested that one of the differences between emerging and traditional donors has been greater “dynamism”, “speed” and flexibility . In the case of Brazil, the absence of a pre-determined, standardized portfolio of expert solutions seems to allow not only for greater flexibility in translating principles and policy into practice, but also greater autonomy and some degree of experimentation at the lower end of the policy-front line spectrum. The limited amount of resources available especially for bilateral projects, for instance, may mean that their implementation takes the form less of an ambitious intervention over a broad slice of local reality guided by predefined technical prescriptions, than an initially circumscribed and somewhat openended enterprise that gradually expands along with its learning curve. Different than what was suggested by Mawdsley , however, this does not necessarily mean that project execution will proceed at a faster and smoother pace. In fact, the mediation apparatus that needs to be put in place for transferring resources abroad, normally through UNDP, adds an intricate layer of red taping that may weight heavily down on project activities on the ground,plastic nursery plant pot as will be further discussed in Chapter 4. Another set of effects resonates with the South-South principles of non-intervention, non–conditionality and demand-drivenness.
In some iterations of Brazil’s discourse, these principles appear as a negation of the country’s historical experience as a recipient of aid from the North, marked by impositions of various kinds, conditionalities in particular. South-South cooperation therefore makes a principled point of not imposing itself on recipient countries, but responding to their demands. The first cooperation model tried by Embrapa in Africa – a regional office located in Accra centralizing cooperation all over the continent – sought to apply the demand drivenness principle quite literally. It involved an “over-the-counter” mode of operation whereby African agents would come to them with their demands. This model was eventually changed with the centralization of cooperation in Brazil in 2010, for reasons that are both operational and political. Now most demands get to Embrapa through its international relations unit in Brasília, mediated by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency . In practice, projects may be, and occasionally are, offered to African counterparts. But one of the points to which the discussion in this chapter leads is that, from an organizational point of view, like most of its Southern counterparts Brazilian cooperation would not have the capability to impose itself on recipient countries anyway. The institutional presence of Brazilian cooperation in Africa is minimal, and it would not have the financial or organizational capacity to monitor, for instance, the implementation of conditionalities. This spares recipients from the bureaucratic burden that development aid usually adds to their already fragile institutional apparatuses and may make them even more dependent on foreign expertise and funds . But on the other hand, this non-interventionist approach brings other kinds of challenges, as it requires more extensive engagement by recipients in all stages of project design and implementation.
This requirement evokes a prominent issue in the development aid scene at large, that of ownership , or how to make local actors carry the projects forward after the donor leaves. This is an element of the Aid Effectiveness Agenda that has been addressed by Northern donors in bureaucratic terms – for instance, by incorporating aid projects into the recipient countries’ own policy systems. Even if ownership has not been explicitly incorporated in Brazilian cooperation’s official policy as such , it is something that individual actors, especially at the front line, care about deeply. Lack of ownership was among the reason why, for instance, the project between Embrapa and Ghana’s CSIR that I was following up in 2010 was eventually abandoned – the latter was not able, or willing, to invest in its last stage, which would demand a significant apportion of local funds for the trainings that were planned to take place next. But in other cases , the organizational configuration of Brazil’s cooperation could end up promoting ownership in the sense that, by requiring that recipient countries, institutions and individual actors invest their own, scarce resources in order to carry South-South projects forward, they would be encouraged to own them. Even if, as we shall see in later chapters, on the ground things are not as straight-forward, the point to retain from this chapter’s perspective is that to promote ownership by making African counterparts share some of the project costs is, again, as much a matter of principles as an effect of Brazil’s limited cooperation resources and particular organizational architecture. Finally, an analogous point could be made with respect to the provider vs. recipient dimension. In my experience with Brazilian initiatives, even if there was an asymmetry in terms of resources and capabilities between Embrapa and the African research institutes, the difference between providers and recipients did not appear as a “trustee-subject” boundary .In the C-4 Project, for instance, African partners were required to play a leading role in the production of diagnoses about the local situation and in the technology adaptation process.
If this concurs to fulfilling South-South principles of horizontality and mutual exchange, it seems to be, again, less a matter of applying principles through a clear policy path than an effect of the capabilities available to Brazilian cooperantes as they come to engage with local actors without a specialized apparatus for producing development-related knowledge. This may be the case even with more elusive assumptions about Brazilians’ supposedly higher socio-cultural capabilities for functioning in other Southern contexts . In Brazil’s cooperation for institution-building in East Timor, for instance, Brazilians’ presumed greater cultural openness for socializing with the locals was eventually made real by their poor fluency in central languages like English or French, which made socialization with other expatriates difficult.As I observed during fieldwork, the language barrier may also encourage the deployment of more practical and tacit idioms, such as joking relations, hands-on work,seedling starter pot and communicative mediation of technological artifacts and other non–humans. In this case and the others, what I wish to suggest is how assumptions about Brazilian South-South cooperation as being different than Northern aid may end up becoming true not because of an alternative, “Southern” bureaucratized path systematically linking principles to front line practice through policy, but due to characteristics at the level of organizations and resources that, from the point of view of established aid institutions, would be regarded as lacking. Finally, another effect of South-South cooperation’s organizational outlook is that those implementing it do not have the same mechanisms as their Northern counterparts for “recycling” failure back into the project pipeline .Especially now that smaller projects are being phased out in favor of structuring projects such as the Cotton- 4, Embrapa is likely to have fewer initiatives in Africa, and each of them will become more visible. Since, as remarked, domestic support for South-South cooperation is far from consensual, and implementing institutions are porous to pressures and influences by governmental sectors other than diplomacy, project failure could become a big issue for the institutions and individuals implementing them. As Leite also noted, many in Embrapa are indeed concerned about the potential for inefficiency that increased demand for South-South cooperation coming from Itamaraty could entail. Moreover, in contrast with scientific cooperation with Northern institutes, in technical cooperation with Southern countries there are no evident immediate returns from the point of view of the institution’s own interests – let us not forget, neither Embrapa nor most other implementing institutions are development agencies. The institute certainly benefited from the generous resources provided especially during the last years of the Lula administration.
CECAT’s infrastructure, for instance, has been useful to other ends like internal trainings, and it is hoped that some benefits may eventually accrue from technology transfer projects, such as access to new markets for Embrapa’s technologies. These and other dilemmas are being confronted as I write, and point to yet another effect of the emerging assemblage outlined here: its open-endedness. These aspects are not fully captured by the established approaches in the anthropology of development discussed here.This chapter argued that, like other emerging donors, Brazilian South-South cooperation is in a process of emergence, characterized by the formation of a unique assemblage made up of new interfaces that bring together, under the aegis of foreign policy, preexisting institutions, discourses, individuals, practices, and politics. What is certain is that it is changing and will continue to change, and if the forward drive unleashed during the Lula administration is not reversed , it could be that the current picture will eventually give way to a more stable and policy-oriented assemblage. However, it is unlikely that, even in this case, Brazilian cooperation will ever look like the picture described in ethnographies of Northern aid; but neither will it ever constitute an entirely alternative model to it. The historical genealogy proposed in this chapter indicates that South-South cooperation, even if discursively constituted in terms of an opposition to Northern aid, emerged from within a global apparatus built under Northern hegemony. As a result, Brazil’s process of emergence as a donor has been highly ambivalent and even contradictory, both internationally and domestically. While South-South cooperation involves a quest for recognition at a global scale, it has also been shaped by the domestic politics of foreign policy and its relations with other governmental and economic sectors such as agriculture. This double directionality is key for making sense of Brazilian cooperation at various levels, as the following chapters will continue to show. A similar point can be made regarding the organizational aspect, which was described here in light of a double claim commonly found in the anthropology of development literature: about development aid’s self-referential character, and its bureaucratization and de-politicization effects. A look at the organizational assemblage of Brazil’s South-South cooperation against this backdrop yielded a three-leveled architecture that is in a sense an inversion of Northern aid’s: instead of prevailing over discursive principles and implementation practice, the level of managerial policy is weak relatively to them. Rather than constituting a specialized, bureaucratized model alternative to its Northern counterpart, Brazilian cooperation has relied significantly on global bureaucracies such as UNDP on the one hand, and on the sector-specific experience of national institutions like Embrapa on the other. This state of affairs has an interesting effect. While South-South cooperation upholds principles that are largely crafted in opposition to Northern aid, it has no coherent bureaucratic apparatus to systematically translate them into practice. Yet, as I have argued in the last section, some of the effects of Brazilian cooperation do go in the direction of some of these principles, such as demand-drivenness, non-conditionality, mutual exchange, tailored projects, and even more elusive assumptions about Brazilians’ higher socio-cultural capabilities for operating in Third World contexts. Rather than being the outcome of planned policy, this seems to be an effect of the practical conditions under which cooperation operates – conditions that, when looked at from the point of view of established aid organizations, would be regarded as immature or lacking.By zooming in from the previous chapter’s hemispheric scale on relations between Brazil and Africa I am inverting my actual research path. The fieldwork on which this dissertation is based started in Africa, more specifically in Ghana, before it got to Brazil and its broader SouthSouth cooperation enterprise. Only then did I start to pay attention to the account Brazilian cooperation provided of itself, which was largely crafted by its diplomatic arm rather than by the front liners themselves. One of the things that stood out since then was a certain mismatch between the concerns shown by those pioneering Brazilian cooperation on African grounds, and what was said about it in official discourse back in Brazil.