One of the main objectives of the research was to provide a deeper understanding of the nature of partnerships developed through trilateral development cooperation. This thesis utilises theoretical concepts derived from postcolonial theory to offer critical insight into the machinations of power within TDC, their linkages to the production and dissemination of development knowledge, and the significance of a more nuanced understanding of the exercise of beneficiary agency within the partnerships. The research suggests that there is enough evidence to support claims that TDC expands the space for the beneficiary partner to exercise leadership over the design, implementation and evaluation of development interventions, which is the definition of country ownership in global policy frameworks. Perceptions of country ownership in effective development cooperation frameworks also place considerable emphasis on the question of which partner voices the development concern and recommend that development interventions are most effective when the beneficiary partner initiates them. A comparison of experiences in the internally driven Triangle of Hope (ToH) project and the donor-driven China-Zambia renewable energy technology transfer (RETT) project suggests that the beneficiary partner shows more interest and is more active in TDC initiatives that are driven by its own demands.
Institutional ethnography (IE) also reveals that the institutional actors involved in the implementation of TDC in Zambia perceive and operationalise country ownership in a different manner. Specifically, some actors tend to limit their focus to ‘getting what
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they want’ from a development intervention such as development knowledge or technologies. In the case of the ToH project, the desired goal was to secure knowledge about foreign investment promotion and economic diversification, while the objective in the RETT project was to secure expertise on the construction and maintenance of solar energy and small hydropower technologies. These actions are part of the diverse strategies bureaucrats developed and institutionalised in response to the hierarchal power relations between Zambia and its Northern development cooperation providers. These unequal power relations are rooted in the country’s history of having undergone colonial governance and donor dominance during the 1980s and 1990s when it was significantly dependent on foreign aid. Northern donors extensively interfered in the Zambian development landscape by using the withdrawal and release of development cooperation as a disciplinary tool to influence national policymaking, especially the uptake of neoliberal economic reform and good governance. Northern donors also assigned their technical experts to lead development projects anchored in government departments or implemented as standalone projects, which contributed to weakening the civil service’s efficiency and country ownership of development.
Chapter Two argues that the paternalism in Northern development cooperation is rooted in the colonial practice of trusteeship, which promotes the notion that people in the global South are incapable of managing their development and so there is a need to supervise and enhance their capacity for progress. This paternalistic approach to development cooperation has made self-determination, non-conditionality and self- reliance central concepts in post-colonial developing countries perspectives of country ownership. Dependency theory was particularly influential in convincing Zambian political and intellectual elites that the country can realise its desired vision of industrial modernity only if it breaks its economic and intellectual dependence on foreign countries and becomes self-reliant. In the past, this dependence was specifically on Northern countries due to the structural inequality that colonialism created in the national economy, such as its reliance on copper production, skilled labour shortages, and its inadequate transport and energy infrastructure. Therefore, like many other newly independent developing countries, Zambia engaged in South- South cooperation (SSC) in order to address these structural inequalities. Over the last
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15 years, SSC from countries such as China, India and Saudi Arabia has become a significant source of support that has emboldened the Zambian government to denounce and gradually delink from ‘the coloniality of power’ that enabled its Northern partners to influence national policymaking. Tensions in the relationship between Zambia and its Northern partners reached a high point in 2011 such that several countries, including Denmark, phased out their bilateral development cooperation activities.
The rapid economic growth experienced in Zambia’s Southern allies has also presented the country with an alternative to the British model of industrial modernity, which it has struggled to emulate since it attained independence. The Zambian government has developed a particular interest in replicating some of the policy experiences of East Asian countries. Consequently, although as Chapter Three has shown, Zambian bureaucrats perceive global policy discourses on South- South/trilateral cooperation to be an imaginary, they still participate in these modalities to access knowledge on the unique policies, programmes and technologies that have contributed to the economic development of East Asian countries. Key stakeholders in the ToH and RETT projects specifically emphasise that they want to ‘learn’ from their Malaysian and Chinese partners. They also point out that their overall goal is to use these projects to build local capacity in specialised areas (foreign investment promotion and renewable energy technologies) and subsequently reduce their dependence on foreign technical expertise to support operations in these areas. Drawing on Walter Mignolo's (2012) concept of ‘dewesternization’, this thesis argues that Zambia’s interest in East Asian models of economic development is a sign of the ‘dewesternization’ of development thinking that emerging powers have accelerated in the global South. It contends that Mignolo’s arguments about how some Northern governments are making efforts to re-establish the legitimacy of Western knowledge systems can be seen through Denmark’s underlying interest in the RETT project. Chapter Five demonstrates that Denmark used the RETT project as a vehicle to transfer its best practice on delivering development cooperation to China. This is part of its wider strategy to ensure that it becomes a much sought after intermediary in
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South-South knowledge exchanges and, through these means, maintain its relevancy in the global development architecture (Danida 2012). Similarly, key stakeholders in the ToH project observed that Japan’s underlying interest in supporting the project was to maintain its reputation as one of Africa’s most important development cooperation providers. In the face of intense competition from China, this makes TDC an important vehicle for Japan to build its soft power influence and retain its status as a global power. Japan’s promotion of Malaysia’s development experiences in the ToH project also aligns with its approach of using TDC more generally to advance East Asian models of economic development. Despite their rivalry over leadership in the global development architecture, Japan and China both have an interest in establishing their individual models of East Asian industrial modernity as their beneficiary partners’ preferred alternative to the Washington Consensus model. However, China is also using TDC to signal that it is capable of learning from and collaborating with Northern countries, to build its image as a responsible global actor and to counter narratives that suggest its development cooperation is predatory.
This brings us to the second research objective aimed at understanding the extent to which the politics of partnership supports or undermines beneficiary country ownership of trilateral development projects. Apart from the image building and soft power interests mentioned above, commercial opportunities are also a key driver of TDC. As discussed in Chapter Five, key stakeholders in the ToH and RETT projects assert that their Chinese and Malaysian partners’ underlying interest in each project was to create a market for their domestic industries in Zambia. These goals align with the SSC approach of ensuring that any form of cooperation results in mutually beneficial relations. This includes enabling a development cooperation provider to obtain market access, trade and investment opportunities for their domestic industries. This approach to development cooperation initially attracted criticism from Northern cooperation providers who argued for altruism, but many have now adopted it and are explicitly blending development finances with their trade and investment agendas. This includes to a lesser degree Japan and Denmark in the ToH and RETT projects, respectively. However, both projects were also primarily aimed at promoting private
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sector development in Zambia – a development agenda the country initially adopted as a policy condition from its Northern cooperation providers almost 20 years ago. The promotion of the private sector development (PSD) agenda and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by Zambia’s development cooperation providers in the ToH and RETT projects constrained, to some extent, country ownership. This is because these global policy frameworks promote external ideas of what the most pressing development needs are and strategies/targets for how the country can address these needs (such as economic diversification and closing the gap in energy access). However, this research makes important contributions to the debates on beneficiary agency by demonstrating that the Zambian government does not engage in a blind acceptance of every donor proposal for TDC projects, but instead only supports the interventions that align with its views on how its development priorities can be addressed. This includes, for example, the promotion of solar energy technologies to address rural electrification in the RETT project. The Zambian government also asserts its sovereignty over the local development landscape through explicit acts of resistance and silent strategies, such as unenthused participation in aid negotiations and project planning or non-implementation of agreed recommendations. Consequently, when it comes to understanding beneficiary agency, lack of action is not always a sign of capacity weaknesses or inadequacy, but is sometimes an active strategy to block the introduction of external development interventions that do not match the beneficiary country’s vision. Chapter Six has shown that the concepts of anthropophagy (cannibalism) and hybridisation also provide critical insight into how beneficiary agency in the ToH and RETT projects involved reflection and action through the selective ingestion, digestion and appropriation of policy recommendations on East Asian models of economic development.
Zambia’s participation in TDC is also shaped by its foreign policy concerns. As discussed in Chapter Five, Zambian stakeholders have taken several measures to protect the country’s diplomatic relations with China and to sustain the easy flow of development cooperation and economic benefits from this relationship. These strategies include supporting the ‘One China’ Policy and hiding negative stories on
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the China-Zambia relationship in order to support China’s strategy of blocking negative narratives on its development cooperation to African countries. China’s economic relationship with Zambia has been strengthened to the point that is now another hegemonic force of power and influence in its development landscape. This has the potential to work against the SSC objectives of ensuring that developing countries have autonomy over their economies and are not dependent on a foreign entity. However, Zambia’s ability to strategically improve its bargaining power in TDC is constrained more by its domestic politics and diverging interests amongst local stakeholders rather than by the geopolitics of development. For example, some politicians interfered in the selection of the companies to be awarded contracts in the RETT project, which resulted in legal issues, a budget shortfall and a change in the type of renewable energy technologies to be promoted (that is from biofuels to solar energy technologies).
These findings have several implications for development effectiveness in Zambia. This thesis has shown that public institutions tend to be the main stakeholders in TDC and, as a result, Zambia’s ability to ensure that development outcomes stand the test of time, is severely challenged by the politicization and centralisation of development planning. At the institutional scale, one of the main reasons for this is that the top- down structure of project management generates high levels of ownership amongst steering committee members, but undermines feelings of ownership amongst other stakeholders (e.g. participants from line ministries, academic institutions and the private sector). In the case of the ToH project, this resulted in line ministry officials losing interest in the monitoring and evaluation of the 12 ToH Action Plans once the project had ended. Chapter Six also highlights that Zambian bureaucrats generally tend to have weakened feelings of ownership and less commitment to monitoring and reporting of donor-funded development interventions, largely as an institutionalised response to the dominance of Northern donors in the 1990s. This includes the donor approach of creating parallel work systems by anchoring development projects in the civil service or implementing them as standalone projects. This is further evidence that TDC does not occur in a vacuum, but is affected by the legacy of past partnerships.
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The lack of internal reporting on project activities also has a serious bearing on the sustainability of development outcomes from TDC since there are insufficient measures in place to retain institutional memory when personnel retire or leave public institutions in Zambia. At present, most bureaucrats at the main institutions involved in the ToH project have little or no knowledge of the 12 ToH Action Plans and the outcomes of the project. The ToH Action Plans have now been shelved, even though significant time and country finances were spent developing them. This study also finds that the sustainability of development outcomes from TDC in Zambia is hindered by changes in the senior political leadership and bureaucratic structures. The president and cabinet ministers tend to interfere in development projects and policymaking which is a factor that has contributed to the reversal of development outcomes from the ToH project, particularly its economic policy reforms. Executive interference in civil service appointments has also led to high staff turnover and the loss of institutional memory gained on foreign investment promotion. The irony is that the Zambian government has recently asked Japan to provide it with technical assistance in the areas of foreign investment promotion in which the ToH project had previously managed to build local capacity.
Development outcomes from the RETT project are at risk of a similar fate. Consequently, it could be argued that knowledge is gained, then forgotten and Zambia is not able to achieve its overall goal of building (long-term) local capacity and attaining self-reliance. Sustainable development is a prominent narrative in policy spaces on effective development cooperation. However, the above examples of dysfunctional knowledge acquisition and retention also challenge claims that TDC can help attain the SDG agenda and address the global challenges associated with extreme poverty, conflict and environmental degradation in fragile and low-income developing countries. The research findings also present several lessons on the role of TDC in the changing geographies of power and development.
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