argue that this conception of technical cooperation amongst developing countries is being challenged in contemporary South-South/trilateral cooperation through the reproduction of mimicry, trusteeship and assumptions about who is the knower-learner in development, which are practices that have historically been a part of North-South cooperation. It also examines the implications of these practices on country ownership and considers the role of TDC in the domestication of development knowledge (that is innovative policies, programmes and technologies) from influential Southern countries and global frameworks such as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Finally, the chapter explores debates about African agency to gain insight into how beneficiary countries are responding to the changing geographies of power and development. Through this discussion, it argues that the ongoing changes require postcolonial scholars to extend core arguments concerning the relationship between power and knowledge production, beyond their focus on the dominance of Northern cooperation providers to the rise of Southern ‘authorities’ on development knowledge.
South-South cooperation for economic development and self-
reliance
The origins of international development cooperation are often associated with the success of the United States in facilitating the economic recovery and expansion of war-torn European countries after the end of World War II through the Marshall Plan. As Farias (2018) points out, the success of the Marshall Plan generated the widespread
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belief that a combination of high rates of financial investments and technical assistance could quickly generate economic growth, and as a result, post-colonial governments in Africa, Asia and Latin America began to appeal for similar forms of economic assistance. In what is considered a foundational doctrine of North-South cooperation, in 1949 US President Harry S. Truman made a commitment in the Point Four program to alleviate poverty in these countries which he labelled as ‘underdeveloped’ through transfers of finances, technology and technical know-how (Paterson 1972). The United Nations (UN) and the World Bank expanded their mandate from post-war reconstruction to promoting development in the global South; the United States, its European allies and Japan also established bilateral aid agencies to facilitate this support; and the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) was established in 1961 to coordinate their development cooperation activities. Through these processes, the terms ‘development’ and ‘development cooperation’ became the normal concepts to describe the diverse challenges found in the global South, and the means for rich countries to introduce technical solutions for enhancing progress and improved well-being in the poorest countries (Rist 2002; Farias 2018).
Initially, technical cooperation (or technical assistance as it was widely referred to) was the focus of most bilateral development cooperation programmes and mostly involved training programmes to ensure the transfer of skills or technologies to the beneficiary country and the placement of Northern technical experts in institutions where local capacity was lacking (Ekoko and Benn 2002). Early forms of technical cooperation were motivated by altruistic reasons such as promoting literacy, immunisation against infectious diseases or encouraging environmentally-friendly agricultural practices. Lancaster (2007, p.29) argues that countries such as the United Kingdom and France also used technical cooperation to support a smooth transition to post-colonial governments so that they could disconnect from their former colonies with as little damage as possible to their international reputation. However, as the Cold War began to intensify in the 1960s, technical cooperation evolved into a political tool for the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) to expand their soft power influence and disseminate their competing philosophies on economic development. This was in spite of an agreement in a 1948 UN General Assembly
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resolution that technical cooperation “shall not be used as a means of economic and political interference in the affairs of another country” (Farias 2018, p.55). As Power (2019) explains, intellectuals such as Walt Rostow helped the US government to establish aid programmes that promoted the notion that beneficiary countries could transform in a linear fashion, from having traditional agricultural-based societies to modern industrialised societies. The theories developed under what is known as the modernisation school of thought promoted a capitalist vision of development that laid emphasis on urbanisation, technological advancement, and the import-export of consumer goods and services through the free market, whereas the Soviet socialist model of industrial modernity promoted state-led central planning, market controls and collective agriculture.
The modernisation school of thought has faced extensive criticism in postcolonial studies for encouraging the global South to mimic the historical trajectory of Western countries in order to become ‘developed’, similar to how colonial education embedded the notion that colonial subjects had to mimic European cultural practices in order to be considered ‘civilised’ (Fanon 1986; Bhabha 2004). The categorisation of numerous countries as ‘least developed’ in World Bank and UN reports based on economic measures such as gross national income (GNI) has also been criticised for discounting what individual countries considered as progress or well-being and for erasing the significance of any economic activity that they engaged in outside the global capitalist economic framework (Ferguson 1994; Escobar 1995). However, modernisation was such an influential ideology that political and intellectual elites in the global South actively pursued diverse strategies aimed at achieving Western-style modernity in an effort to distance themselves from the notion of being ‘underdeveloped’ (see Mudimbe 1988; Shrestha 1995). Within this context, technical experts from the ‘developed’ global North were perceived as possessing the secrets to industrial modernity and were thus highly sought after by developing countries. Developing countries also began to explore the potential for South-South exchanges to facilitate economic growth when, as Paterson (1972) points out, it became clear that a large percentage of Northern technical cooperation was being used to advance the geopolitical and economic interests of donors rather than to enhance their development. Subsequently, the
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political leaders of developing countries agreed at keystone events, such as the 1955 Bandung Asia-Africa conference, to strengthen their political and economic ties in order to address the socio-economic inequalities that had come out of the colonial era and to assert their sovereignty in global governance structures (Haq 1980).
This form of solidarity which became known as South-South cooperation (SSC) went beyond the Northern approach of development cooperation by explicitly integrating political, economic and development cooperation activities. Political cooperation was aimed at fostering transnational anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-racist solidarity movements, but became centred on the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961, which was a space for countries to navigate the ideological tension between the United States and the Soviet Union (see Prashad 2008). Economic cooperation involved the promotion of intra-South trade and investments, and also the coordinated campaign to demand for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) to govern international trade through the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) (Haq 1980). Countries such as China, Kuwait, Libya, India, Brazil and Nigeria also provided other developing countries with concessional loans for large infrastructure development projects, although the purpose of this financial assistance was less about economic solidarity and more about strategically building diplomatic support to resolve regional conflicts (Lancaster 2007). Then, in the 1970s, technical cooperation amongst developing countries (TCDC) became the focal point of SSC and the main modality for achieving its broader goals. As discussed in Chapter One, TCDC was largely advanced in UN forums and specifically through the financial support of agencies such as the Group of 77 (G77) and the UN Special Unit for Technical Cooperation Amongst Developing Countries (now known as UNOSSC). The interest in TCDC was to a large extent a reflection of the prioritisation of education, science and technological advancements in both the Western capitalist and socialist economic models that had influenced development thinking (Rist 2002). In addition, TCDC was also aimed at encouraging developing countries to generate internal solutions, as an act of resistance against the tendency for Western approaches to encourage mimicry and universalism in their dissemination of development knowledge and technology, with little regard for contextual differences (Matthews 1987). Most post-colonial
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countries were also looking to diversify their sources of technical cooperation in order to end their dependence on expensive Northern expertise, which was considered a form of neo-colonialism (Boye and Mennasemay 1988), and to tackle the human and institutional capacity gaps in their bureaucracies and industries that led to this dependency.
This line of thinking on capacity development and self-reliance was heavily influenced by the dependency school of thought which emerged as a critique to modernisation theory in the late 1960s. Dependency theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank, Walter Rodney and Samir Amin generally argued that underdevelopment in the global South was not a result of these countries merely lagging behind on a linear path to industrial modernity as it is alleged in modernisation theories, but rather a result of the exploitative relationship between the global North and global South, which they described as a core-periphery bond. Dependency theorists contended that periphery countries were incorporated into the global capitalist economic system as sources of minerals, agricultural commodities, and labour during the colonial era; and as a result, they relied on the core for manufactured goods, technologies, specialist skills and services. They also argued that the dominant core was not committed to addressing this inequality because it still disproportionately benefitted from this economic order and its longstanding political and intellectual linkages with the subordinate periphery. Theorists such as Samir Amin argued that each developing country, therefore, has to ‘delink’ from the core and rely on South-South cooperation (SSC) and other internally driven solutions in order to foster economic growth and self-reliance (Amin 1990). As Rist (2002, p.135) points out, proponents of dependency theory generally assumed that self-reliance would reduce the challenges developing countries experienced from not having full control over their economies, promote horizontal solidarity, end the core- periphery dynamic and transform the periphery into a multitude of ‘centres’ dependent on no one.
Despite the popularity of these assumptions of self-reliance, early observers such as Mahbub ul Haq were quick to question if SSC was just another passing fad or a new trend, mirroring long-term realities:
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Is this [SSC] just a by-product of the current disillusionment with the North? Is it merely a romantic notion, based on an ‘idealised’ South that does not exist? Or is there far more to it? Does it finally represent an effort by the South to delink (however partially) their economic growth from the North and to get organised for collective bargaining in international forums? Are we witnessing here a fundamental break from the patterns of past development and a serious search for alternative development styles? (ul Haq 1980, p.139)
ul Haq acknowledged that outright rejection of foreign goods, technology or value systems could not support self-reliance and instead suggested that developing countries should undergo a process of ‘intellectual liberation’ that would enable them to accept external values that align with local needs and avoid problems of engaging in ‘slavish imitation’ (ul Haq 1980, p.149). He also went on to argue that developing countries were reliant on networks provided by Northern-based organisations to promote SSC and that this would continue to act as a hindrance to their long-term ability to achieve their goals, unless they organised and financed most activities themselves. This was a reasonable warning given most developing countries had begun to struggle after the 1970s oil crisis, which triggered fluctuations in the global price of commodities and a global economic recession , but it is not clear what efforts, if any, were made by developing countries to transform SSC into a self-financed mechanism.
As Farias (2018, p.87) notes, South-South economic and political cooperation began to decline from the mid-1980s as the priorities of most developing countries shifted from striving for economic self-reliance to securing economic stabilization loans from Northern financial institutions, whose economies fared much better during the global recession. The end of the Cold War also made delinking from the global North undesirable as more countries embraced the new drive for economic globalization in the 1990s and shifted their development strategies from a socialist state-led model to the Washington Consensus neoliberal free-market based approach. Small flows of South-South technical cooperation kept ‘the spirit of Bandung’ alive during this period, but there is very little scholarly literature to provide critical analysis of the
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activities that took place. According to Ekoko and Benn (2002), numerous regional organisations and networks within the United Nations systems were established to promote capacity development and the exchange of policy experiences in areas such as trade, food security, disaster preparedness and public health management. Trilateral development cooperation (TDC) emerged subsequently as a complementary modality through which Northern donors could formally support the South-South technical cooperation. For example, Japan began to facilitate Asia-Africa exchanges after the 1st
Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) in 1993. Therefore, although the birth of SSC lies in political processes concerning decolonisation and the Cold War, the origins of TDC lie in efforts to strengthen the use of Southern knowledge during a decade in which Northern institutions, practices and policies dominated the global development architecture. As discussed in the next section, this makes country ownership of TDC a concept ripe for analysis through a postcolonial lens.