Proyecciones de la economía mundial y el comercio de alimentos

A history of colonial governance and the perpetuation of specific hierarchies and inequalities through international development cooperation initially embedded the notion that post-colonial Zambia should learn from Northern countries in order to attain industrial modernity. Later, the notion that technical cooperation from other developing countries could provide context-relevant knowledge to build Zambia’s human resource capacity gained ground, following the emergence of dependency theory in the late 1960s. Dependency theory also promoted the idea that collaborating and learning from the experiences of other developing countries could strengthen Zambia’s ability to generate internal development solutions, to delink from its dependence on Northern technical expertise and eventually become self-reliant (Shaw 1976; Chan 1992). There is some resistance to this knower-learner approach to development thinking amongst some development practitioners and it has been criticised by development scholars (e.g. Crush 1995; Baaz 2005). However, the notion of utilising South-South technical cooperation to support local capacity building, economic growth and self-reliance is still prominent in the Zambian imaginary of development.

The current structures of TDC are also helping to reinforce the fundamental problems associated with positioning the beneficiary country as the learner in development partnerships, instead of disabling them. This is because the knowledge, technology and finances are still flowing in one direction – from the development cooperation

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providers to the beneficiary partner. For instance, when I enquired what development cooperation providers had learnt from them, most Zambian key stakeholders in the ToH project stated that their partners had learnt nothing at all from them, while those in the RETT project stated that Chinese institutions learnt how to collaborate with African partners and manage cultural differences. Zambian stakeholders did not appear to believe that their development partners were superior to them but that they were in possession of the technical expertise or resources that they required. They explicitly emphasised that their objectives when participating in the ToH and RETT projects were not to impart any knowledge to their Malaysian and Chinese partners, but to acquire specialist knowledge from them (that is, attracting foreign direct investment and developing/maintenance of renewable energy technologies). The fact that the development cooperation providers are not learning from the beneficiary country in these projects indicates that policy narratives that claim TDC supports mutual learning and horizontality are not reflected in development practice and outcomes in Zambia.

Knowledge transfers in TDC are also more complicated than assumed since the ToH and RETT projects have enabled China, Malaysia and Japan to promote East Asian models of economic development as alternatives to the Washington Consensus model, and thereby advance the ‘dewesternization’ of development thinking in Zambia. The ToH and RETT projects have also facilitated the domestication of global development policies such as the private sector development agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and in doing so, notions of what are the most pressing development needs in Zambia. As Chapter Two pointed out, these global policies work against country ownership by overlooking the needs and realities of individual countries. In addition, these policies perpetuate narratives of success and failure in the global South by focusing on economic growth indicators but disregard the conditions and activities in developing countries that operate outside the global capitalist economic framework (Brooks 2017). For this reason, it is important to scrutinise the source of development interventions introduced through TDC, especially given that the use of policy conditionalities in North-South cooperation took significant control of development planning away from beneficiary countries during the Structural

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Adjustment era. However, there is a real risk of infantilising beneficiary countries if we assume that its development cooperation providers have an overwhelming influence over their national development planning.

As Adriana Abdenur (2019) points out, the beneficiary country does not passively accept and replicate all policy experiences transferred in South-South technical cooperation, instead it uses appropriation and hybridization to manage the introduction of external interventions into the local development landscape. Abdenur (2019, p.45) specifically draws on the concept of anthropophagy (or cannibalism) as a metaphor for explaining how the beneficiary partner exercises agency, consisting of action and of reflection, by selectively ingesting and digesting parts of the ‘other’ before regurgitating them into something new. The outcome is one of hybridity in which, mirroring processes of resistance outlined by Bhabha (2004), the beneficiary country contests and negotiates the power of its development partners to transfer their cultural practices by modifying these practices to suit local needs or contexts. Similarly, Zambian stakeholders in the ToH project selectively ‘devoured’ and regurgitated policy experiences from their Malaysian partners:

In the ToH Action Plans, there were suggestions on how to encourage small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) development based on the Malaysian experience but it did not match the local context. For example, Malaysia has more job opportunities than the population of its skilled labour force, but Zambia has high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labour in some sectors. As a result, we found that most of the recommendations that the Malaysian consultant provided based on his country context in this sector were not suitable for Zambia, so we did not implement them. However, Malaysia’s development experience was a good model for Zambia to learn from more generally because it still faces some of the challenges found in developing countries like ours. (Interview with ToH Project Coordinator, 17 January 2018) Mr K from the ToH Banking and Finance taskforce corroborated the above statement from the ToH Project Coordinator and clarified that the Zambian government was still

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able to draw on knowledge gained from the Malaysian experience to come up with alternative policy reforms to encourage SME development after the ToH project had ended (Interview, 28 February 2018). Another sign of beneficiary agency is that an external proposal for TDC is more likely to be ‘ingested’ in Zambia if it aligns with local views on how development problems can be addressed, such as how the promotion of solar energy technologies in the RETT project aligned with plans for rural electrification. In addition, evidence from the RETT project indicate that beneficiary partners only accept technical training and policy recommendations that they feel align with local plans or needs:

The project plan did not prescribe the type of technological and institutional capacity building that should be undertaken in the project, so this opened up space for us to work out what we want. Each partner had different views on capacity building. The Danish Programme Manager at UNDP China had a different perspective on the type of training that we needed and even our Chinese partners had their own views. However, we also prescribed what we wanted to get out of the training. For example, last year when we sent people to China for solar and small hydropower training, we sent a write-up of the kind of training that we wanted them to receive… In these kinds of partnerships, you need to understand what is best for each one of you. The Chinese can be pushy. Always trying to push their own agenda. Like even during the planning for the small hydropower demonstration plant we’ve had cases where they feel “we need to do this,” but we also give them the perspective from the Zambian side to show them that their dynamics are different and ours. For example, our demographics are different. In China, a small community can be a million people but when we take the small hydropower plant to Serenje district the population size there will only be a few hundred, so we need to adjust to the different conditions. The Chinese feel that maybe everything including the policies that work there can work here, when the truth is that some of them cannot. (Interview with RETT Project Manager, 22 September 2017)

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These are all important examples of how Zambian stakeholders exercised agency and negotiated power inequalities. However, as Islam (2012, p. 169) points out, while anthropophagy is a useful concept for understanding how actors position themselves with regards to an ‘other’, it cannot easily be employed to negotiate contradictions within the ‘self.’ Consequently, Zambian bureaucrats who participated in the ToH and RETT projects were successful at employing anthropophagy or hybridity to negotiate the power that development cooperation providers have to introduce external interventions in the local development landscape. However, they were not as successful at employing this strategy when negotiating internal power struggles with senior policymakers and politicians who have authority to shape national development planning and the execution of development projects. The interference of the senior leadership has significantly affected the sustainability of development outcomes from the Triangle of Hope (ToH) project as changes in the political leadership have resulted in the modification of national policies, staff turnover in the civil service and, subsequently, loss of institutional memory.