The first official account of Brazil’s South-South cooperation, published in 2010 by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency and the Institute for Economic and Applied Research , defines technical cooperation in terms of federal resources spent on “training and capacity-building activities, related administrative costs, and expenses with various materials and equipment” .Behind the apparent straightforwardness of the phrase South-South technical cooperation lies a sea of ambiguities and controversies for each term, not all of which will be discussed here.Among emerging donors, the preference for terms like cooperation or partnership over development or aid is a strategic marker of the claims to difference discussed above . But at least in Brazil, cooperação became the preferred word for what is better known in the North as development or développement because desenvolvimento is most promptly associated with a national endeavor. Sometimes, cooperação para o desenvolvimento is a term of choice that merges the two ideas. For aid, there is the Portuguese term ajuda, but in the field I never heard this term designating the cooperation provided by Brazil. In contrast with Africa, then, where development most often refers to a blurred interface between national states and foreign agencies , the notion of development in Brazil has been more thoroughly “nationalized”. The Green Revolution is a good example of how the Brazilian actors “nationalized” a model of agricultural development originally crafted at the level of the international development system. A similar process is taking place today in the construction of Brazil’s South-South cooperation apparatus, which has involved on the one hand borrowing models and procedures from the international development community , black flower buckets and on the other drawing on the sector-specific work Brazilian institutions have carried out domestically.

The first level is that of foreign policy, from where demands for stepping up South-South cooperation efforts have come, and where the general principles for delivering it are crafted as official discourse. The core institution here is Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Relations, commonly known by the name of its headquarters in Brasília, the Itamaraty Palace. Individual actors include diplomats and officials linked to diplomacy or other parts of the federal government. The second, intermediary level is that of policy and management, concentrated in a small cooperation bureaucracy centralized in the Brazilian Cooperation Agency , itself institutionally submitted to the Ministry of Foreign Relations. The third level is that of implementation, or front line practice, where one finds a wide range of institutions in charge of carrying out projects and other cooperation initiatives on African or Brazilian grounds. This dissertation will focus on the work of one such institutions, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation – like the ABC, also submitted to a federal ministry, that of Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply. As the diagram seeks to show, Brazil’s South-South cooperation presents a singular kind of architecture where the mid-level of managerial policy is less prominent than the other two.In Northern development aid, on the other hand, even if in practice projects follow less “high modern” grand planning designs than “are pulled together from an existing repertoire, a matter of habit, accretion, and bricolage” , the level of policy is generally regardedas over-determining both front line practice and principles. It is in this sense, for instance, that Li and others will claim that the development apparatus depoliticizes relations by rendering technical historically constituted power asymmetries at the scale of both local politics and global political economy. On the other hand, after half-century of Western development aid, its principles have been largely rationalized into technical policy guidelines. Even a controversial mechanism such as aid conditionalities has been justified based on technical claims : while many recipients of aid see it as a humiliating assault on their sovereignty, donors brand it as an evidence-based tool for promoting good governance and ownership among them.

Finally, besides bureaucratic organization, significant differences are to be found in the other arm of the transnational development apparatus :the private industry of NGOs, academics, think-tanks, consultants and other development workers in charge of drafting, delivering and assessing projects, whose pipeline is fed by professionals trained in specialized development studies programs. Although it does exist at a small scale in Brazil and seems to be growing, this industry is not significant in the delivery of official technical cooperation. Different from Northern aid and similar to other emerging donors , in the provision of Brazilian cooperation there has been a prevalence of state institutions at all organizational levels, from principles and policy to implementation. Let us turn to the ones within the scope of my fieldwork.The fact that Brazilian cooperation is essentially foreign policy-driven means that, by and large, the demand for enhancing technical cooperation with African countries and others in the global South has come from Itamaraty.The institutions in charge of project implementation are however many – according to the 2010 IPEA/ABC Report, they can be counted by the dozens, and the vast majority are state institutions .The system is therefore highly decentralized at the implementation level, and the Brazilian Cooperation Agency is supposed to provide a core policy and managerial node to this otherwise widely dispersed network. The ABC is Embrapa’s main institutional partner in most if not all its technical cooperation activities in the global South; indeed, its agents were a continual presence within my ethnographic scope. The Brazilian Cooperation Agency came into being in the mid-eighties as a rearrangement of preexisting federal bodies involved in managing development aid received by Brazil. Since the recent spike in South-South cooperation, it has increasingly accumulated the function of coordinating of the full cycle of technical cooperation that is both received and provided. The agency is supposed to receive and negotiate demands for cooperation coming from countries in Africa and elsewhere, and channel Itamaraty’s funds for implementing them. The ABC is not a full-fledged, autonomous agency like the ones providing Northern aid; like many of their counterparts in the global South , it is a department and operational arm of the Ministry of Foreign Relations. High-level strategic planning is not, according to a recent report , part of the agency’s purview. The life of the ABC changed considerably during the Lula administration , when demands for South-South cooperation skyrocketed. The agency’s budget tripled accordingly, from a meager 19 million in 2006 to 52 million reais in 2010.Although a historic record high, this is almost negligible compared to the budgets of Northern agencies like USAID, which are counted by the billions. One of the ABC’s claims is that every dollar allocated to projects can be further multiplied if indirect costs are factored in. The most significant of these are salaries paid to front line staff.Since state institutions implement the bulk of technical cooperation, and it involves mostly capacity-building with only limited transfer of materials and equipment,french flower bucket most of this kind of expense would have already been covered by the Brazilian state. This is the case of Embrapa, whose staff includes highly qualified personnel, often research scientists holding PhDs and other advanced degrees.Staff has increased in the last few years along with the agency’s budget, albeit not at the same rate.But since it is not an autonomous agency, none of its personnel in fact “belongs” to it; they come, rather, from two main sources: Itamaraty and UNDP. The former’s appointees are career diplomats, chancellery officials or assistants, whom, in my experience, tended to occupy higher rank positions. Most of the agency’s staff was hired through UNDP as project consultants to carry out functions of project management, or operational tasks like translation. A practical effect of this configuration is that the ABC has exceptionally high staff turnover.Itamaraty appointees may be – and indeed, eventually are – relocated elsewhere, to diplomatic representations and embassies abroad.

And most UNDP employees are hired on short-term contracts, normally of one year with limited renewal possibilities. The rest of the staff – cargos de comissão appointed by the Agency’s Director, himself a diplomat – usually lasts only as long as the latter’s management cycle. It is at this level that strategic functions such as planning and coordination tend to be concentrated . For carrying out its mandate, the Brazilian Cooperation Agency has to rely heavily on other organizations: national institutions like Embrapa at the implementation level, but also international agencies at the level of policy and management. As of the writing of this dissertation, there was no specific legislation regulating the provision of cooperation by Brazilian institutions. In practice, this means that those implementing projects in Africa and elsewhere are not legally allowed to perform basic tasks such as buying and contracting abroad for the benefit of non-Brazilian institutions and citizens . A chief way by which the ABC has been getting around this is by partnering up with the UNDP or other international organization, which then acts as the implementing agency.Moreover, different from many Northern agencies and like most other emerging donors , the ABC does not maintain permanent offices abroad. Instead, the agency makes ample use of UNDP’s extensive worldwide network, present in almost every country, in order to procure goods and services as well as hire staff to work in Brazil’s projects. While some have remarked that this partnership allows to overcome “legal and bureaucratic obstacles [facing] Brazilian government agencies working overseas” , fieldwork indicated that, from the perspective of those working at the front line of projects, this may appear as itself an obstacle to practical engagements . Besides the red tape implied in this scheme – resources have to flow from the ABC to the UNDP office in Brazil, and then to UNDP’s counterpart in the recipient country before it gets to project front liners –, there are supplemental financial costs, as the United Nation’s agency charges a non-negligible fee for performing such bureaucratic mediation.The UNDP has been also providing support to the ABC for mapping and strengthening a network of South-South cooperation stakeholders, including a pool of volunteers and specialists as well as staff of the Brazilian embassies abroad.This and other emerging networks make up a nascent cooperation industry in Brazil formed by professional experts in managing and delivering cooperation.As already remarked, the implementation of official cooperation has been mostly a job for staff from national state institutions, rather than consultants and NGO workers trained in development studies and related academic fields, and experienced in the international development industry. Today, thus, Brazilian cooperation front liners’ professional affiliation and commitment lie not in the development industry but in their home institutions; for the most part, they do not rely on the provision of cooperation neither for a living nor for their career advancement. This is not a trivial fact in light of the literature’s claims about international development as a self-referential, inertial organizational apparatus. At a micro scale of cooperation practice, however, there seems to be no fixed correlation: while the work in South-South projects may bring personal or professional benefits to particular individuals, in other instances the opposite might as well be the case, like in the not uncommon situation when participation in a project implies removing individuals from their regular work activities back in Brazil. Not all technical personnel is willing to commit to cooperation projects abroad, and this acceptance seems to be always the outcome of situated negotiations between individuals and their home institutions. Moreover, if the Brazilian Cooperation Agency is taken as an organizational equivalent to, say, USAID or the World Bank, it would suggest the misleading conclusion that Brazil’s cooperation is fragile in all aspects of the project cycle, from strategy and design to execution and evaluation. Indeed, according to Mawdsley , with the exception of the main Arab donors, emerging donors’ cooperation institutions tend to be bureaucratically feeble: most Southern counterparts to the ABC also have “insufficient numbers of trained personnel”, are “constrained by path dependency”, and “lack power relative to other parts of government”. But if we look from a different scale, the relative institutional flimsiness of the ABC is “compensated” by the preponderance, upstream, of Itamaraty as a policy guide, and, downstream, of implementing institutions like Embrapa. This is salient especially in the case of the latter, which enjoys an institutional robustness and national prestige that the ABC can hardly dream of ever matching.Moreover, some implementing institutions are building up their own expertise for managing their South-South activities, including by establishing or strengthening of international relations units whose operational functions may even overlap with those of the ABC.