South-South Cooperation - A determined step into the unknown
In recent years, South-South Cooperation (SSC) has been touted as the next big thing in development cooperation. The touting itself is nothing new. The will of countries from the global south to collaborate more and better goes back to the Bandung conference some 60 years ago. However, it does seem that the years to come are finally likely to see this aging political will turning the world of development aid upside down by profoundly shifting our understanding of donors and recipients.
As countries in the Global South are divorcing the stigmatic third world classification at the speed of light while displaying growth rates that leave Western countries green with envy, the ability to, and appetite for, increasing cooperation within the southern hemisphere is exploding. Nonetheless, as a recent seminar organised by the Danish Institute of International Studies and the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation (@UNOSSC) demonstrated, South-South Cooperation is still a largely unexplored field when it comes to academic research, capturing good practises and putting in place systems and processes for supporting SSC.
The one exception to this rule is the rapidly growing involvement of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) in SSC - mostly in developing countries and mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa. As argued in a recent policy brief with Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde, this trend has almost redefined SSC as a relationship in which a recently emerged economy collaborates with a developing country often belonging to the group of least developed countries (LDC).
Expanding our understanding of South-South Cooperation - a few cases in point
However, the seminar offered an opportunity for research institutions and SSC experts to demonstrate, that the world of SSC goes way beyond this definition. The focus of the seminar was South-South Cooperation in the area of peace and development and had a particular focus on SSC in, with and, at times, between fragile and conflict-affected states. The two cases presented dealt with South Africa’s involvement in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the involvement of Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda in providing capacity development assistance to South Sudan. The cases not only demonstrated the prevalence of SSC within Sub-Saharan Africa but also that SSC has transitioned from its traditional focus on technical development cooperation into relations within the realms of statebuilding and peacebuilding.
Jason Stearns (@jasonkstearns) from the Congo Research Group at New York University’s Center for International Cooperation explained how South Africa’s main contribution in the DRC had been at the political level. South Africa had been supporting the DRC within a range of sectors, but it was South Africa’s brokering of the 2002 Sun City peace deal that marked its biggest achievement. While the peace deal later broke down, South Africa was credited with having brought (most of) the warring parties together at the negotiation table using particularly the good offices of Thabo Mbeki to convene stakeholders within the DRC and from the region.
Kristoffer Nilaus Tarp (@KristofferTarp) presented research conducted in South Sudan in 2011, 2013 and 2015 on the so-called IGAD initiative. In the IGAD Initiative’s first phase, 200 active civil servants were deployed for a 2-year period to South Sudan to coach and mentor their South Sudanese counterparts. As the civil servants were retained on payroll, the initiative is one of the largest examples of South-South cooperation to date. The initiative unfolded during a period in which South Sudan went through financial crisis and renewed conflict but yet demonstrated tangible positive outcomes. Focus on the IGAD initiative was on building core governance functions and improving service delivery.
Anita Mathur from the UN’s Department of Political Affairs (DPA) stressed that also the multilateral system increasingly turn to SSC to provide support within the areas of mediation, peace-making and conflict prevention. While the political bodies of the UN including the Security Council and the Peacebuilding Commission are increasingly integrating language on SSC in mandates and country strategies, the operational machinery of the UN is also pushing ahead integrating SSC in its modus operandi. DPA’s roster of senior and thematic mediators has numerous mediators from the Global South and the Electoral Division almost always work with Southern partners.
Siafa Hage (@siafahage) who has been working for and with the g7+ group of self-identified fragile countries also noted growing focus on what the g7+ groups has coined fragile-to-fragile (f2f) cooperation. Examples include Timor-Leste’s support to Guinea-Bissau, which included guidance and advice as well as financing for 2014 election voter registration and the payment of civil servants. The g7+ forum had also served as a platform for advising the government of the Central African Republic on how to best contain the current crisis.
What can we learn from the new realities of South-South Cooperation?
In an attempt to digest the cases and analysis presented, a three interesting observations spring to mind.
Firstly, the two country examples of South Africa in the DRC and neighbouring countries in South Sudan all have strong regional aspects. South Africa has, in the words of Jason Stearns, skin in the game as it cares a great deal about the DRC as a potential provider of energy, as a promising market and not the least as a critical regional security factor. South Sudan’s neighbours certainly also have skin in the game historically as the main recipients of refugees and other negative spill-over effects from the crisis in (South) Sudan but prospectively also as the main beneficiaries of a stable South Sudan. In both cases, the regional aspects seem to have been the main driver of constructive engagement but also a significant potential risk. Further research should be undertaken into the importance of regional dynamics in SSC and as a first step into this domain, this author is currently co-drafting an article on the impact of regional developments on the IGAD initiative.
Secondly, there seems to be a need to redefine SSC as partnerships spanning a much broader range of “sectors” than traditional technical development cooperation. In fact, it would seem that SSC around peace and security issues holds significant promise and that we are currently studying a tip of a potentially much bigger iceberg. This may challenge the political-institutional foundation of SSC as anchored solidly in the development discourse and development policy forums including in the multilateral area, where SSC is largely seen as falling under the United Nations Economic and Social Council. If SSC continues to expand within the peace and security realm, new platforms such as the g7+ may develop into equally important forums for discussing and advancing SSC.
Thirdly, SSC still seem largely based on ad hoc partnerships and somewhat random models. In describing the initial stages of the IGAD initiative, I sometimes referrer to the stars aligning in the right way at the right time i.e. that a few people had a great idea and the energy, funding and skills to make it happen. However, if SCC for peace and security is to evolve as a more easily applicable tool in the toolbox of international assistance to fragile and conflict-affected states, we can probably not rely on the stars aligning correctly every time. On the other hand, as deputy director Inyang Ebong-Harstrup from UNOSSC noted, one of the qualities of SSC is its detachment from large global frameworks. As f2f cooperation will often require a triangular donor to help cover project costs, the key is thus seems to be to find a way of identifying, nurturing, facilitating and sometimes funding SSC without strangling the bottom-up and contextual nature of these partnerships.
Finally, the same can be said with regards to documenting the outcomes and impact of SSC. While most SSC partners would likely despise large and mechanistic OECD-DAC-ish results frameworks, there seem to be a genuine appetite to generate a better evidence base for the growing number of SSC partnerships involving a fragile and conflict-affected state (and probably in SSC more broadly). The research conducted on the IGAD initiative in which a team of researchers (including from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs) have revisited the initiative consecutively and applied an “embedded” and almost anthropological approach to studying the initiative and it outcomes seems very promising to this effect.