Regarding the alternative regimes available to influence the global rules, norms, and practices of development cooperation, the DCF stands out, even if it lacks in efficiency what it offers in legitimacy. What is more important, however, is that emerging countries, and especially China, have decided to create their own financial institutions, such as the BRICS's New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, to address the paucity of resources available to finance infrastructure investments in ways that they find appropriate. Increasingly, multiple alternative, competing regimes none of which can act as focal points for the global governance of the 2030 Agenda—are to be expected given the diffusion of economic and political power without corresponding institutional change. This is the case despite the fact that emerging countries have not joined forces to propose or put in place an alternative development cooperation regime of their own. Moreover, as already mentioned, the status quo of implementing development cooperation by means of bilateral (or trilateral) agreements is not such an undesired outcome from the perspective of these countries.

To what extent do the capacities of emerging countries provide incentives for them to exert voice in the GPEDC? Clearly, among Brazil, India, and China, China is the country with greater capabilities. Yet, China's average gross domestic product per capita is still less than 30 per cent than that of the United States and other DAC members. The total amount of cooperation provided by 29 emerging countries in 2014, which would correspond to the ODA definition, was only about \$32 billion (or 17 per cent of the total), compared to \$150.8 billion (or 83 per cent of the total) of the 28 DAC members (Luijkx and Benn 2017, pp. 4, 23–24). Concerning financial capabilities, therefore, emerging countries are still falling behind. The abandoning of the "common but differentiated responsibilities" principle as the GPEDC negotiations evolved only compounded the gap in financial capabilities between emerging countries and DAC members.

What are the emerging countries' capabilities in terms of technical skills? Surely these skills are related to financial ones. Xiaoyun (2017, p. 8) also notes that these countries have a "weak knowledge base, compared to the strong voices of DAC-based research institutes". Crucially, joining the GPEDC entails costs in terms of building or maintaining technical capacities. In particular, the commitment to gather and process data, to build indicators, to follow pre-defined and somewhat rigid monitoring frameworks, and to meet particular targets13 is much more costly for developing countries than for the DAC members. Emerging countries, in particular, are not eager to take on additional costly commitments given the much lower volume of resources they dispose for their own development cooperation and the view that these commitments reflect approaches which are from the DAC and alien to them. Needless to say, unlike other regimes, the GPEDC has no barriers to exit, and these countries had no loyalty whatsoever to the GPEDC.14

In this regard, it is crucial that, for all its merits, the GPEDC has been much more successful in promoting stakeholder *participation* than allowing for its *influence*. 15 In other words, greater stakeholder participation in the GPEDC has not allowed emerging countries to influence the main regime outcomes. As a DAC-driven endeavour, the GPEDC has an agenda that reflects the concerns of DAC members, while at the same time some of the core concerns of emerging countries are absent from the regime. Indeed, Xiaoyun (2017, p. 9) notes that

the GPEDC also needs to realize that many topics listed in the working program are not the primary interest of the emerging powers. For instance, the GPEDC continues to focus on the "aid management" agenda, and a strong linkage between development cooperation and development is still missing.16

Equally important, Bracho sees the GPEDC monitoring framework as "the weak link" of the Busan promise of bringing OECD and emerging countries under the same regime. It evaluates compliance on the basis of 10 specific commitments, five of which are for providers. Yet, provider commitments "had been conceived by and for traditional donors. As the Southern providers had not committed to them and considered them inappropriate to their unique situation, they were opposed to being evaluated by these criteria".17

This is the case because much of the expanded participation allowed by the GPEDC's innovative governance structure is non-decisional.18 It does not suffice to grant emerging countries a seat at the table if they lack actual decision-making power because the agenda has largely been set beforehand.19 Conceptually, this can be seen as a problem of democratic accountability associated with the lack of both input and output legitimacy,20 since the proclaimed enhanced input legitimacy of the GPEDC derived from greater stakeholder ability to exercise voice is not matched by stakeholder influence.

## 16.4 Conclusions

A global development cooperation regime is necessary from a systemic perspective. This is the case not just because of the efficiency gains expected from regimes in general, but also and primarily because the 2030 Agenda comprises a plethora of stakeholders and distinct, though intertwined, issueareas that can hardly be linked and coordinated by means of bilateral agreements or several plurilateral ones. The existence of common goals regarding this agenda suggests that regime-building is possible.

Yet, efforts to this date to create a global development cooperation regime have failed. In the most noteworthy attempt, the GPEDC attempted to become an inclusive, legitimate, and global multi-stakeholder regime. But emerging countries, as key stakeholders, have preferred to exit the new GPEDC regime instead of trying to shape it through the channels provided for them to exercise voice. Though explanations for this outcome usually focus on the incompatibility of interests between emerging countries and DAC members, there is ample evidence of the existence of shared interests among them, including the fact that they worked together up until the Mexico High Level Meeting.

Rather, I resort to models of stakeholder participation in governance institutions to suggest that Brazil, India, and China exited the GPEDC for other reasons. First, because they did not value the regime much to begin with to put it bluntly, they just did not care about the aid effectiveness agenda. Moreover, although the DCF could hardly be considered a very attractive alternative, given its shortcomings, the status quo was not such an undesired outcome.

Second, given their limited capabilities as well as the lack of channels for participation in decision-making afforded to them, emerging countries had no realistic possibilities of exerting *influence* in the GPEDC's pre-set agenda. GPEDC compliance came at a price they were not willing to pay, and by exiting the regime these countries refused to offer it a further veneer of legitimacy.

An important clarification is in order. The preceding analysis is not meant to suggest that a development cooperation regime without emerging countries is necessarily bound to fail, but only that such a regime could hardly be considered global, and would be sub-optimal to the extent that it excludes important stakeholders. Furthermore, Brazil, India, and China are not just accidental stakeholders, since arguably many of the principles, norms, and standards embraced by the GPEDC primarily and consciously target the international development cooperation of these countries.

What are the implications of the preceding analysis for future efforts to build a global development cooperation regime? First, as a strategy to increase the importance of the regime to key stakeholders, it is important that they own the regime (which is a way to create loyalty, in Hirschman's [1970] terms). For that purpose, building a new regime, even if more costly and uncertain, may be necessary. Second, these stakeholders need to have the capacity, in terms of resources as well as technical skills, to influence outcomes in the new regime. A challenge is to strike the balance between extending stakeholder decisional participation without compromising regime efficiency, at the risk of creating another regime similar to the DCF.

Malawi, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Uganda, and the UK have all served as co-chairs. The GPEDC's governing body includes 25 representatives of national and local governments, civil society, the private sector, trade unions, parliaments, and philanthropy. It meets biannually to guide the work of the GPEDC.

20. For the origins of the concepts of input and output legitimacy, see Fritz W. Scharpf (1999, p. 6).

Sidiropoulos (Eds.), *Development cooperation and emerging powers: New partners or old patterns?* (pp. 243–262). New York, NY: Zed Books.

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## Failing to Share the Burden: Traditional Donors, Southern Providers, and the Twilight of the GPEDC and the Post-War Aid System

*Gerardo Bracho*

## 17.1 Introduction

In November 2011, at a High-Level Meeting in Busan, Korea, all the main state actors of the international development cooperation agenda (traditional Development Assistance Committee [DAC] donors, new non-DAC donors, providers of South-South cooperation, and recipient partner countries) came together with other stakeholders to create a new platform to be run jointly by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)-DAC and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP): the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation (GPEDC).1 The GPEDC was expected to be a place where traditional DAC donors (DDs) and emerging South-South cooperation (SSC) providers would work together to discuss and eventually adopt standards, norms, and commitments in order to improve their development cooperation and align it with the interests of

Gerardo Bracho is a Mexican diplomat and Associated fellow at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research. Mr. Bracho is a member of the Mexican Foreign Service, though he takes full responsibility for the views expressed in this paper, which should not be attributed to the Mexican government. He would like to thank Brian Atwood for his valuable comments on this subject as well as André de Mello e Souza, Heiner Janus, and Elizabeth Amann for their valuable corrections and suggestions.

G. Bracho (B) Paris, France

S. Chaturvedi et al. (eds.), *The Palgrave Handbook of Development Cooperation for Achieving the 2030 Agenda*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57938-8\_17

recipient countries (RCs) and the "common good". In Busan, these two state actors seemed to reach a deal on an ad hoc "burden-sharing" framework based on "differential commitments". The GPEDC was set to incarnate a new *global* regime of effective development cooperation.2

By 2014, however, the *Busan agreement* laid in tatters as the main Southern providers (China, India, and Brazil) boycotted the first GPEDC High-Level Meeting (HLM) in Mexico City.3 Since then, the GPEDC has followed an erratic course without them, and neither the UN Development Cooperation Forum nor any other institution has emerged to replace it. To gauge the fate and the potential of the GPEDC, it is important to understand why the Busan compromise fell short of its promise. Indeed, the episode illustrates the difficulties that new emerging powers (EPs) face when they attempt to join the post-war liberal order on terms that reflect their new status and potential. Are they capable and/or willing to join this order that is now in flux and also threatened from within by rising populism and nationalism? Is this order willing to make a proper space for them? Will at least some of them try to construct an alternative and competing order, as happened during the Cold War? The analysis of the relations between the GPEDC and the Southern providers can throw some light on these and similar questions.

In a recent essay (Bracho 2017), I reconstructed in some detail the history of the relations between Southern providers and the DAC-sponsored aid effectiveness agenda from the Paris Declaration (2005) to the GPEDC HLM meetings in Mexico City (2014) and Nairobi (2016). Building on this analysis, the first section of this essay briefly reconstructs the path to the Busan agreement. The second section presents an abstract "burden-sharing" model to highlight the issues at stake. The third section uses this model to explain why the Busan agreement collapsed. The final section offers conclusions based on this analysis.

## 17.2 The Promise and Failure of Busan4

Since its inception in 1960, the DAC has represented itself as a "standardsetting" institution: the place that created the concept of ODA and where the norms and "good practices" of donorship are established and administered. Like other OECD bodies, the DAC has a double task: It establishes standards for its members and, through "outreach", it attempts to recruit new members and encourage actors outside its membership to adopt its standards. In the last couple of decades, as "new donors" have appeared or re-emerged on the scene, the DAC has been relatively successful: It has eight new members and four "participants", while another 16 countries regularly report their ODA to the DAC (Gulrajani and Swiss 2017).

It has been much less successful, however, in convincing the other 10 or so "new donors" from the South—the "Southern providers"—to join the agenda. These include even OECD members, such as Mexico and Chile. These actors share two distinctive features. First, they are still recognised by the international system and the DAC itself as "developing countries".5 For the most part, they are classified as upper-middle-income countries: Though relatively wealthy, they still face many development challenges and thus have a right to receive ODA6 (Besharati 2013; Bracho 2015).

Second, as developing countries, they have been cooperating with peer countries for many decades under the SSC tradition born in Bandung in 1955. They have thus their own narrative about development (though with few codified standards and norms), which, in many ways, is opposed to that of the DAC. As was to be expected, co-opting or even cooperating with *these* actors as *donors* has turned out to be challenging.

Until recently, the DAC tried to cooperate with Southern providers, mainly through the effectiveness agenda. This is an "action agenda" in which all participants are expected to commit to specific tasks and policies to make the cooperation they provide or receive more transparent and effective. Its founding document—the Paris Declaration of 2005—embraced precise and quantifiable commitments for two state actors: donors and recipients. Some *new donors*—for example, the East Europeans—had no problem in accepting this. But the Southern providers, averse to being treated as "donors", refused to play along. After years of deliberating on how they might fit into an agenda devised for traditional donors and recipients, they finally agreed to participate in Busan as "providers of South-South cooperation" (Busan Article 14); that is, as a third bilateral actor seen as a *special kind* of donor and requiring differential treatment. Indeed, Busan was widely considered a success because it managed to bring the Southern providers on board (Atwood 2012; Eyben and Savage 2013; Kharas 2011; Kim and Lee 2013; Kindornay and Samy 2012; Lightfoot and Kim 2017).

The fact that the main Southern providers (China, India, and Brazil) signed the outcome document in Busan, along with all other countries that fit in this category (e.g. Mexico, Thailand, Turkey, Indonesia, South Africa, Chile), seemed to indicate that the Southern providers had finally found their place in the new Partnership. First, in contrast with Paris, they participated in the drafting of the Busan outcome document, in which they made a place for themselves, especially in Articles 2 and 14. Second, they were fully incorporated in the governing structure of the new GPEDC, represented in one of three ministerial co-chair slots and also in an extra one on the Steering Committee. Third, in joining, they recognised "common goals" the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—and "shared principles", but on the understanding that SSC was different and that they would have "voluntary" and "differential commitments"; the latter concept being a proxy for common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), which Mexico originally introduced in the outcome draft, supported by the following argument:

The concept (CBDR) is not meant to allow DAC donors to repudiate or dilute their responsibilities. It is neither meant to allow new large South-South providers to "do nothing". On the contrary, it is meant as a way to incorporate us, the latter ones, into the agenda, at a realistic and appropriate level given our middle-income countries' condition. (Working Party on Aid Effectiveness [WP-EFF] 2011)

The donors, however, were not happy with CBDR, which in climate change negotiations had been interpreted *negatively* as the absence of responsibilities. In this context, "differential commitments" emerged as a compromise concept, which, according to the Mexican rationale, implied that Southern providers were indeed willing to *commit*, though at a differentiated level. The idea was to put forward a positive interpretation of CBDR more closely linked to its literal meaning. The promise of Busan depended on this nuance.

The weak link, however, was the monitoring framework of the GPEDC, which evaluated compliance with 10 specific commitments: five for "providers", three for recipients, and two presumably for both. The "provider commitments" had been conceived by and for traditional donors. As Southern providers had not committed to them and considered them inappropriate to their unique situation, they were opposed to being evaluated by these criteria.

In an ideal world, Southern providers would have defined which, if any, of those commitments they could take on board and at what "differential" level; if unable to accept some, they would have been encouraged to propose alternative definitions and measures that better reflected their own circumstances. But the real world was very different. First, it was not clear which countries should belong to this new constituency of "Southern providers". Although there was a long-standing narrative about SSC, it had been developed at a very different time and encompassed *all* developing countries engaging in horizontal technical cooperation among *equals*—a narrative enshrined in the Buenos Aires Plan of Action (1978). Southern providers, however, were generally considered to be a smaller subgroup of EPs—generally richer and/or more capable of providing support to poorer/weaker developing countries and using a broader set of cooperation instruments. But which countries belonged to this subgroup exactly? This was not clear.

There was also little consensus about what counted as the cooperation they supplied. There was a shared perception that ODA was a "Northern flow", but there was no consensus as to how to define SSC. Would it involve only flows or also pro-development policies? And if the former, how would they be monetised given that much SSC was given in kind rather than in cash? The monitoring framework required indicators of performance, and these, in turn, required a clear definition of SSC in monetary terms. In sum, to participate properly in the Busan monitoring framework, Southern providers needed a new tailor-made narrative to underpin their new "differential commitments". This narrative did not exist, and it was not clear who and which institution should create it (Besharati 2013; Bracho 2015; Fues 2016, 2018; Quadir 2013).

To bridge the gap between the ideal and the real world, the Korean hosts (supported by Mexico, Brazil, and the DAC chair) came up with a deal on the "participation of South-South cooperation providers in the Busan Global Monitoring framework". Taking as a starting point "the different nature of South-South cooperation", the agreement stated:

These new providers of assistance are not expected to participate in the global system proposed in this initial Partnership arrangement. Their future participation in aspects of the global system is a decision left to evolving and sovereign processes, and this will in no way inhibit their full participation in the Partnership as South-South partners. (WP-EFF 2012)7

The "Korean deal" was adopted by the GPEDC, but in order for it to endure two things had to take place. First, on the basis of their own "sovereign processes", the Southern providers had to develop their own narrative and their own "differential commitments". Second, while this was being sorted out, the GPEDC had to keep its word and leave the Southern providers temporarily out of the monitoring process.

Unfortunately, none of this happened. After Busan, a number of more or less legitimate Southern initiatives in search of a new narrative were initiated, but they produced few results.8 At the same time, the Southern providers failed to work together in the GPEDC and made no effort to link those other discussions, however inconclusive, with the Partnership. On the eve of the GPEDC meeting in Mexico, their agenda had not advanced an inch.

Around the same time, the results of the first monitoring exercise of the GPEDC were made public. Though based on legitimate data provided by RCs, the report broke with the spirit of the Korean deal: The provider activities of China and India were monitored and subject to practically the same scrutiny as those of the traditional donors. Surprisingly, neither the traditional donors nor the Southern providers seemed to care or even notice. By then, both had withdrawn their support for the "differential commitments" formula that had underpinned the Busan promise and the Korean deal.

The collapse of this deal hollowed out the framework through which Southern providers were expected to participate in the GPEDC. As a result, the negotiations over the communiqué for the Mexico HLM started again from square one, as if Busan had never happened. Indeed, much of the substance of the negotiations between traditional donors and Southern providers—this time through a Mexican facilitator—was once again about "who should do what". Southern providers (China especially) complained that traditional donors intended to exaggerate the role of SSC; vice versa, traditional donors accused Southern providers of assuming no commitments and overemphasising the role of North-South cooperation. But now, with "differentiation" off the table, the middle ground had disappeared, and the negotiations went nowhere. In the end, dissatisfied with their whole GPEDC experience, the main Southern providers—China, India, and (partially) Brazil—decided not to participate in the first meeting of the Partnership in Mexico City (2014). They have not returned since. The Busan compromise collapsed and the GPEDC lost its global and inclusive character (Bracho 2017).

# 17.3 A Simple Burden-Sharing Model

of the Bilateral Negotiations at the GPEDC There are a number of papers on why and how the Southern providers left the GPEDC—or as some (wrongly) would have it, never *really* joined in the first place (Constantine et al. 2015; Li 2017; Li et al. 2018). Though these papers are weak in their historical narrative, most of the explanations that they have put forward are in one way or another relevant. There is one underlying factor, however, that has been overlooked in the literature and operated at a deeper level throughout the political negotiations in both Busan and Mexico City. As I suggest in my narrative above, this is the failure of traditional donors and Southern providers to compromise on the crucial issue of their *identities* and the *responsibilities* attached to them. In other words, the Busan compromise collapsed *mainly* on the question of *who does what* or, in other words, of *burden*-*sharing*.

To better analyse the issue, I present below an abstract model of a "burden sharing game". Before doing so, however, we need to understand how does burden-sharing play out in the development agenda. The starting point to answer this question, is to recognise that aid represents an *effort*, and thus a *burden* for donors. If supplying development aid is rarely a purely altruistic endeavour, this does not mean that there is no effort, and thus burden, involved. This burden is quite straightforward when we refer to quantity: As any other official flow, aid implies a budgetary effort. Matters are more complicated when we move to *quality*, since here the costs or burdens implied are *sui generis—as is the case of the costs of complying with the aid effectiveness agenda*.

First, there are administrative costs that arise from keeping with the effectiveness commitments.9 But there are also costs at a deeper and more important level, because donor countries must "sacrifice" a degree of sovereignty, as when they join any international regime. In principle, donors could subordinate all the aid they give to their own political and/or economic interests and present it to the RCs as a "take it on these terms or leave it" proposition—though, of course, a degree of "mutual benefit" should be involved for aid to materialise at all.10 In such case, they have an incentive to give more (though worse) aid, in their own (egoistic) terms, often in a "race-to the bottom" competition with others—as was the case in the Cold War, and as I will argue is, to a certain extent, becoming the case again. The point of the GPEDC, with its commitments and monitoring framework, is to encourage donors to refrain at least in part from such behaviour and to adopt practices that directly further the *common good*, even at the expense of relegating their immediate national interests. To the extent that the benefits from aid accrue to all players, irrespective of their contribution (i.e. in reducing pollution, poverty, uncontrolled mass migration, terrorism, etc.), a system that encourages good aid can be perceived as a global public good (Kaul 2000). In this case, the usual mismatch between individual costs and global rewards brings up the issue of collective action and the problem of free riding (North 2005 [1990]; Olson 1965). When new players appear in an area in which established players are well organised and produce a public good through an implicit or explicit *burden*-*sharing agreement*, the latter will naturally try to encourage the former to follow the same rules in order to avoid unfair competition and free riding. This reasoning was, in fact, a crucial underlying driver that moved DAC donors to bring the Southern emerging powers into the GPEDC.

In the aid effectiveness context, moreover, burden-sharing is not straightforward because the burden to share is not fixed, as it is in the case of the costs to maintain a multilateral organisation (which is mostly a zero-sum game). As development has revealed itself to be a more complex and less tangible objective than the founding fathers of the development paradigm originally thought, the *aid burden* that must be divided among the various donors is not particularly fixed: All donors are expected to comply with the effectiveness standards and with the 0.7 per cent gross national income target, irrespective of what others do.

Now that some of the specificities of burden-sharing in the aid agenda have been explored, we are ready to move on. To the extent that development aid, both in its quantity and quality (effectiveness), represents an *effort*—and thus a *burden*—for donors, negotiations among donors and between donors and recipients often involve bargaining over burden-sharing. To better capture the logic of these negotiations in the aid effectiveness agenda, Table 17.1 presents an abstract burden-sharing game with four possible scenarios and three players: DAC donors, Emerging Powers, and Recipient Countries.11 In each scenario, DDs and EPs incur *costs*, considered as foregone national benefits due to their compliance with the aid effectiveness agenda. These costs are (arbitrarily) set to five units for full responsibilities or commitments and only two for lessstringent, differentiated ones. Each level of costs is linked to a distinctive identity in the international cooperation architecture. These costs measure the effort of suppliers, but also the benefit of recipients and the common good: the greater the effort, the larger the benefits. In this respect, the model optimistically assumes: First, that by complying with the effectiveness agenda, providers generate matching benefits on the receiving end. Second, that the benefits directed to the RCs, usually to their standing governments, serve the common good. These assumptions, of course, often do not reflect reality.

The four scenarios with their corresponding outcomes are summarised in Table 17.1.

**Scenario A** represents the status quo of a North-South divide paradigm with just two players, in which Southern powers go unnoticed under the

**Table 17.1** The burden-sharing game

*Source* Author

common identity of "developing countries" with a right to ODA and a tradition of providing (modest) SSC flows. In this scenario, the DAC donors bear all the responsibilities. Total costs/benefits amount to 5. **Scenario B** represents a situation in which Southern powers appear as donors *tout court* and have the same responsibilities as traditional donors. Total costs/benefits amount to 10. In **scenario C**, Southern powers appear with a new identity as *Southern providers*; they are now considered a special type of donor with a right to ODA but with *lower and/or fewer* tailor-made *differentiated responsibilities as providers*. 12 Meanwhile, the traditional donors retain their usual burdens. Total costs/benefits amount to 7. Finally, in **scenario D**, Southern EPs retain their traditional identity of developing countries with no responsibilities (as in scenario A), but now the traditional donors reinvent themselves as "providers" and begin to shed their historical responsibilities. Total costs/benefits tend towards 0.

The game starts with **scenario A**. Then a new set of players—the emerging Southern powers—arrive on the scene, disrupting the status quo and unleashing a burden-sharing game. The DAC donors will naturally try to co-opt these new players into their own regime. They will thus strive towards **scenario B**, in which all providers assume full responsibilities—the situation that generates the greatest benefits for RCs (10 units). But the Southern powers will consider this burden-sharing arrangement *unfair*, and thus unacceptable, since it does not recognise their situation as developing countries with their own development challenges. They would rather preserve the status quo of **scenario A**. But traditional donors now consider this old scenario—in which they bear all the responsibilities—to be outdated and also unfair. Moreover, **scenario A** generates fewer benefits for recipients (only 5 units). Two scenarios are now left. The first is **scenario C** with its *differentiated responsibilities*. This scenario is a *compromise* in which, unlike **scenarios A** and **B**, both traditional and Southern powers—now with the new identity of Southern providers—*gain something*, though not as much as they might like: Traditional donors incorporate the Southern powers into the effectiveness system, whereas the latter agree to join, but at a *differentiated* level. This is a burden-sharing agreement that both players can consider *just* and that generates greater benefits for recipients (7 units) than the status quo (5 units). Though not the first choice of any of the actors, it clearly represents the best collective outcome for this burden-sharing game. The other option is **scenario D**, which involves *no responsibilities*. This scenario of *no compromise* is the same as scenario A, but here the traditional donors, unhappy with the status quo, assume a new identity and begin to shed their own responsibilities: The quality or effectiveness of aid now begins to decline, moving towards 0. This is the worst outcome for recipients and for the common good as well.

# 17.4 Applying the Burden-Sharing Model to Better

Understand the Collapse of the Busan Promise I will now return to the historical narrative of Sect. 17.1 to show how this simple model helps to explain the dynamics of the negotiations among state actors in the effectiveness agenda and beyond. The status quo (i.e. scenario A) represents the workings of the post-war aid system that emerged in the 1950s and was based on only two types of state actors: *donors* with the responsibility to give aid, and *recipients* with the right to receive it. In this clear-cut, bipolar, North-South divide, the latter were expected to eventually leave underdevelopment behind, "graduate" (i.e. reach development), transform themselves in donors, and eventually join the DAC (or adopt its best practices), agreeing thus to "share the burden" with full donor responsibilities, as depicted in scenario B. As we saw in Sect. 17.1, a number of "emerging donors" have moved from scenario A to scenario B; the DAC has grown from eight members in 1960 to 30 members today.

The same strategy did not work with the Southern EPs, which by the early 2000s had begun to generate large amounts of cooperation. Refusing to be reclassified as donors when, according to the DAC's own rules, they still had the right to ODA, they rejected scenario B and joined the Paris Declaration in 2005 as recipients, as in scenario A. The Accra Action Agenda in 2008 took a step forward by recognising that developing countries not only receive aid from the North but also cooperate with one another under SSC rules and principles. This made SSC visible and gave nuance to the narrative of the RCs, but it did not change the status quo: the bipolar North-South divide of scenario A.

In 2011, the stakes rose in Busan. DAC donors, deeply affected by the financial crisis, were generally in dire straits. Moreover, global challenges, starting with climate change, were mounting. At the same time, Southern EPs, which had fared better during the crisis, had a larger and increasing share of the overall development cooperation portfolio. In this new context, DAC donors were increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo and the rigid North-South divide, in which they bore all the responsibilities. As EPs rejected scenario B and the traditional donors rejected scenario A, scenario C won the day in Busan. But it was a Pyrrhic victory that quickly unravelled, opening the way for scenario D, which, as we shall see, has taken root in different ways. The triumph of scenario D over C, which represented a fair formula of *burdensharing* that could in principle be exported to more consequential regimes, suggests a defeat of international cooperation. In what follows, I will consider why C failed to gain acceptance and why D, the worst outcome, prevailed in the end.

#### *17.4.1 The Strategy of Traditional DAC Donors*

With hindsight, we can see that the consolidation of scenario C faced significant obstacles that went beyond the development cooperation agenda, both from the North and the South. As we have seen, in Busan traditional donors were uneasy with "differentiation" because they saw in it a synonym for "no commitments". But the most powerful donors had a deeper mistrust of scenario C, because even if it meant that the EPs were ready to somehow share the aid burden with them, it would help the latter to consolidate as a distinctive group of like-minded countries (i.e. as "Southern providers"). The rise of the "Global South", dragged by a group of Southern EPs, was beginning to reshape the world economy, fuelling fears that it could also derail the liberal post-war international order and its aid industry. As John Gray has observed, liberalism has always had two faces: a tolerant one ("the search for terms of peace among different ways of life") and an expansionist one ("a prescription of a universal regime") (Gray 2000, p. 8). The liberalism that underpins the post-war order is tilted towards this second, more problematic face, which has been well ingrained in the "crusader mentality" of US foreign policy since the Wilson administration (Anderson 2015; Kissinger 1994).

This latter mindset helps to explain the strong preference of key traditional donors for scenario B of co-optation and their uneasiness with scenario C based on differentiation—even in a weak regime such as development effectiveness, for the latter could create a "bad precedent". They feared that the rise of the Global South would reignite the North-South confrontations of the 1970s under new and more menacing circumstances.13 To some extent, that danger was real: Though it never came to much, the idea of creating some sort of DAC for Southern providers, which would challenge the monopoly of the DAC on shaping the aid regime, lingered in the air, and there were even some vague attempts to put it into practice (Besharati 2013; Bracho 2015).14

In sum, key traditional donors were uneasy with the *differentiation* at the heart of scenario C, not only in its negative interpretation (no commitments), but also in its positive one of *different* commitments underpinned by a *different* SSC provider narrative. Finally, a scenario C—in defining different responsibilities for clearly identified groups of providers—incarnated a more structured and harder aid regime than the status quo of scenario A; this at a time when many traditional donors, due to financial stress and/or geopolitical considerations, were striving for a weaker aid regime. Indeed, some traditional donors were keener to move from the status quo of scenario A to the weaker aid regime of scenario D than to the "differentiated commitments" of scenario C.

#### *17.4.2 The (Diverse) Strategies of the Emerging Powers*

Although key traditional donors were uneasy with scenario C, they had, in principle, accepted it as a gesture to help bring the EPs into the GPEDC in Busan. As Li et al. put it, the concept of differentiated commitments on a voluntary basis was part of the compromise made by the DAC to "buy in more stakeholders, particularly China, India, and others" (Li et al. 2018, p. 149). Nonetheless, as the Korean deal stated, the EPs bore the main responsibility for implementing scenario C through their "sovereign processes", which, as we saw in Sect. 17.1, never really took off. Why did they let this compromise scenario lapse?

To begin, the emerging Southern powers were not clearly united behind scenario C (Bracho 2017). They were all in favour of "differentiation" (i.e. against assuming a donor identity), but they gave the term diverse meanings. Some had the standard negative view of CBDR as an (awkward) concept for *no commitments*. Others had a more positive one of *different commitments*. Both views eventually made it into the Busan outcome document, which included an Article (14) backed by Mexico and Brazil stating that the new "*providers* of South-South cooperation" would eventually participate in the monitoring framework under "differential commitments" (scenario C), and another Article (2), introduced by China and India, that stated that "South-South *partners*" would take on (Busan) commitments only "on a voluntary basis" (scenario A). But after Busan, the ad hoc alliance behind Article 14 disintegrated, while India and China, now partly joined by Brazil, moved even more forcefully towards scenario A and its traditional SSC narrative with no commitments. Entrenched in scenario A, the main EPs sent the message that they were not willing to participate *seriously* as *providers* in the GPEDC. But as they were not willing to do so as *recipient*s either (and nobody expected them to), the message was that they were not willing to participate *at all*. Accordingly, they left the GPEDC at the eve of the Mexico meeting.

But why did some EPs insist on backing scenario A and others scenario C? At first sight, they all had few incentives for moving away from scenario A, in which—as SSC partners and keeping with their own decades-old SSC narrative—they had a great degree of freedom and no specific responsibilities. This narrative had for years allowed them to think of themselves as part of a "homogeneous South", in which they played a leading political and intellectual role, and with which they shared a common colonial or neo-colonial past and had collaborated in the struggles at the UN and other fora (Abdenur 2014; Bracho 2015, pp. 15–16; Esteves and Assunção 2014; Weinlich 2014). Finally, within the framework of the North-South divide, the rapid rise in the amount of SSC that they supplied could be presented as a purely quantitative phenomenon as opposed to a qualitative one, which would have required a shift in their role. In short, why should they take on *donor*-*like* responsibilities while they still faced important domestic challenges, their resources were scarce, and the risks of fracturing the political South or losing ODA in practice (whatever the formal rules) were high? These questions haunted—and continue to haunt middle-income countries that toy with the idea of adopting a stronger provider identity.15

Nevertheless, the EPs also had incentives to move away from scenario A to embrace some version of scenario C (i.e. to shift from a partner to a provider narrative) and gave some signs that they were ready to so. In a recent study on new donors, Gulrajani and Swiss argue that a country is enticed to take on a donor identity "driven by the desire for state legitimacy as an advanced and influential nation" (Gulrajani and Swiss 2017, p. 8). More than prestige is at play. On the eve of the twenty-first century, the Southern EPs had integrated themselves more or less successfully into the whirlpool of globalisation and were eager to match their new economic status with a more relevant political one on the international stage. They signalled, in various ways, that they were ready to take on more responsibilities at the regional level, and some even at the global level—and development cooperation is indeed an ideal tool of *soft power* to do so (Nye 2011).

Moreover, the major EPs were not only offering much more cooperation, but also behaving *politically* as providers. Both China and India created institutional frameworks in which their leaders periodically met with their African counterparts to announce large "cooperation" programmes. Brazil and Turkey also took a visible political stand as providers. Finally, these powers were also giving signs that they no longer considered the traditional SSC framework (in terms of narrative and institutions) to be adequate for representing their new roles and the new reality, as when India launched the *Delhi process* for renovating SSC (Bracho 2015; Fues 2018), and China issued *white papers* on aid that were not clearly rooted in a traditional SSC narrative (Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China 2011, 2014).

In sum, it is fair to say that the EPs had incentives to entrench themselves in scenario A but also incentives to move towards scenario C. The former option made headway in India, which was still a low-middle-income country marred by poverty. In contrast, China had fewer incentives to opt for scenario A in principle, but these were boosted by deep concerns with the DAC and the effectiveness agenda—a mix that gave way to a *defensive strategy*. Li et al. (2018) identify four such concerns, which they apply to the "rising powers", but which were especially relevant to China. These are: *political legitimacy, attribution of responsibilities, definition of the agenda, and trust* (Li et al. 2018, pp. 151–152).

The first concern—political legitimacy—is based on the fact that, despite the formal participation of the UNDP in its Secretariat, the GPEDC is not a universal UN body but rather one that is still presumably driven by the OECD-DAC. This concern was expressed from the outset, but had it been paramount, the EPs (which collaborate with the OECD on many other topics) would never have participated in the effectiveness agenda in the first place.

The second concern is in fact about "burden-sharing", which I have put at the centre of the whole story and which the EPs perceived in a negative way. As Professor Li argues, China perceived the GPEDC as a ploy of the DAC donors to share their "heavy burden accumulated over the decades" (Li 2017, p. 7), and thus dilute their own contributions to development—considering the aid burden as a zero-sum game (Weinlich 2014). In other words, the EPs did not perceive "burden-sharing" as an honest attempt to bring them into the agenda as providers; even when they were joining with "differential commitments", they remained suspicious of the project. They welcomed the inclusion of this concept as a "big compromise" (Li 2017, p. 7; Li et al. 2018, p. 149), but they did not take it seriously.

Li et al. (2018) identify the "definition of the agenda" as the EPs' third concern. I see this in a broader sense as a concern that the GPEDC would not be a venue where "differences" would be respected but rather a forum to pressure the EPs to accept the Western aid paradigm embedded in the postwar liberal regime. As we have seen, this was a well-grounded concern: The post-war liberal regime is indeed driven by a "crusader mentality" (Lind and Wohlford 2019).

The fourth and final concern was *trust*—a crucial ingredient for international endeavours to succeed (Messner et al. 2013). To a certain extent, most of the other concerns boil down to a lack of trust. The Busan compromise of scenario C portrayed the GPEDC as a neutral venue underpinned by the participation of the UNDP, which would respect *differences* among narratives, practices, and levels and types of commitments. The EPs were happy with this message, but some doubted that the DAC donors really *meant it*. Lacking trust, they perceived the GPEDC and its talk about transcending the North-South divide and transitioning from "aid to development effectiveness" as a smokescreen to coerce them into an unfair "burden-sharing" exercise and the liberal Western aid regime. As they lacked the intellectual and institutional resources of the North to be able to counter this with a modern *Southern narrative* of their own (a factor explored in Li 2017; Li et al. 2018), they preferred to adopt a *defensive strategy* and to stick to what they knew: the traditional SSC discourse. This allowed them to stay in the comfort zone of "no responsibilities" and the long-established discourse of the homogeneous South developed by the UN. They thus defended the status quo of scenario A rather than venture into the presumed "trap" of a new scenario C—though, in fact, as we have argued, the traditional donors were not so sure about the virtues of scenario C themselves.

Following this logic, the EPs that backed scenario C were those that did not share as much the concerns that haunted China and others. Take the case of Mexico (Villanueva Ulgard and López Chacón 2017; Bracho 2017). It was eager to participate in the effectiveness agenda, but like all other Southern EPs, it refused to be reclassified as a donor (i.e. it rejected scenario B) and considered itself part of the SSC community. Yet, in contrast with most other Southern countries and as a member of the OECD, an observer at the DAC, and a country that no longer belonged to the G77, Mexico had fewer political constraints and much less of a trust deficit. Therefore, it actively advocated for scenario C. Moreover, as it shared the values and policies of the post-war liberal order, the "costs" that Mexico might have had to pay by eventually joining the GPEDC and its monitoring framework as a provider were much lower. But being a modest provider and one too close to the North to have the required legitimacy, Mexico was not in a position to lead the South.16 Without the support of the big Southern players, scenario C was bound to collapse—and eventually did.

#### *17.4.3 The Strategy of Recipient Countries*

I will now explore the position of RCs in the "burden-sharing battle" among traditional donors and EPs—acknowledging their limited clout due to the power asymmetries among these three actors. The model reckons that RCs are better off under scenario B (10 units) and thus predicts they would join the traditional donors in pressuring the EPs to adopt full donor identity and responsibilities. The model also suggests that recipients would prefer scenario C to the status quo of scenario A and would receive ever-diminishing benefits from scenario D. Nonetheless, the facts only partially confirm these predictions. Traditional donors have expected RCs to join them in "disciplining" the EPs. To some extent, the latter have done so, as when they have publicly asked the EPs to be more transparent and/or to untie more of their aid, or when they have reported the "donor activities" of those powers, as they did when they precipitated the collapse of the Korean deal.

But RCs have not advocated in a systematic way for scenario B—not even in the negotiations of the Busan outcome document and the Mexican communiqué, when they mostly stayed away from the negotiations between traditional donors and EPs. They had reasons to take this hands-off approach.

First, many RC's preferred to see traditional donors and EPs competing with each other rather than coalescing into a common donor group. This outcome was compatible with scenarios A, C, and D, but not with scenario B. This preference for competition can be explained in different ways: (i) one possibility is that RCs do not consider the Western aid regime to be wellaligned with their own interests17; (ii) another is that they gauge that Western donors and EPs have distinctive comparative advantages, and thus wanted to keep them separate to benefit fully from both (Bracho and Grimm 2016); and (iii) finally, it is possible that—independent of their assessment of Western donors and EPs as providers of aid—they prefer to keep them separate to increase their *own* negotiating power (Greenhil et al. 2016), much as they often did with Western and Soviet aid during the Cold War.

Second, RCs rejected scenario B out of their allegiance to the common house of the South. Just as the EPs hesitated to portray themselves as Southern providers, let alone donors, RCs—for deeply rooted historical reasons—are reluctant to demand that they do so. For both actors, path dependence reinforced the status quo of scenario A (North 2005).

The first argument for "competition" suggests why recipients would not be as keen for scenario B as the model suggests. But it does not rule out scenario C, in which the EPs retain their differences and comparative advantages, and thus continue to compete as providers while assuming well-defined responsibilities. Indeed, scenario C would fit into a framework of healthy, *structured competition* that avoids the *race*-*to*-*the*-*bottom* type exemplified by scenario D.

In contrast, the second argument—the allegiance to a "common Southern identity"—rules out not only scenario B but also C, and it leaves scenario A as the only strategy to follow, which is indeed what recipient continue to do, especially at UN fora. But if, as the game suggests, scenario A is suboptimal in terms of benefits, RCs, by keeping to a narrative of a homogeneous South, do not seem to be following the strategy that best represents their long-term interests and the common good. Moreover, by entrenching themselves in scenario A, both RCs and EPs have indirectly contributed to pushing the development cooperation agenda towards the overall weaker aid regime of scenario D.

#### *17.4.4 Sliding into Scenario D of a Weak Aid System*

Since the collapse of the GPEDC as a global forum, the weaker aid regime of scenario D has been gaining ground through three mutually reinforcing trends or processes: (i) the so-called *Southernisation* of the traditional donors' narrative and practices; (ii) the decline of the EP's agenda and the failure of the EP's to assume a coherent Southern provider identity; and (iii) the universalisation of the development cooperation agenda and the erosion of the North-South divide. I will consider each of these in turn.

As the literature has rightly observed, there has been a movement towards convergence between North-South cooperation and SSC through the socalled Southernisation of the Northern narrative, practices, and commitments (Bracho 2015; Fues 2015; Klingebiel and Esteves 2021; Mawdsley 2018). Instead of the DAC socialising the EPs (as in scenario B), the opposite has been taking place: Traditional donors have been co-opting the Southern narrative. DAC members do not consider themselves "donors" anymore, but rather "providers"; they now classify their assistance as "cooperation" rather than "aid"; they portray their aid relations as "horizontal partnerships among equals" rather than as "vertical relations among principals and clients"—as was the case, and often explicitly so, in the past; they now present their aid as stemming from "voluntary commitments" rather than from "historical responsibilities"; finally, they consider their assistance to be motivated by "mutual benefit" rather than "altruism".

To some extent, traditional donors have been co-opting Southern language to keep up with the more politically inclusive times, and this has had its positive effects. Thus, for example, partnership has not been an empty word, and developing countries now have a greater say in the aid industry than they did in the early days of the agenda. Moreover, by closing the gap between the narratives of the South and the North, Southernisation is contributing to a convergence that could help to re-create a global aid regime in the future (Janus and Tang 2021).

But more worryingly, *Southernisation* has also been about moving to a new, looser aid system, as with the one the Southern EPs enjoy in practice: a system with both lower and/or fewer commitments and weaker and more flexible rules. Since Gleneagles in 2005 and Accra in 2008, DAC donors have not made significant new collective commitments and have watered down earlier ones, including the 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product, the mother of all donor commitments.18

DAC donors have also loosened their own rules. For example, they have been tearing down the once stringent barrier between ODA and profit-making commercial flows—the crucial distinction on which their whole narrative and paradigm were built.19 Here they are again following China, which often provides aid as part of "packages", mixing it with trade and investment and tying it to the use of its own companies' products and services (Bracho 2018b; Brautigam 2009, 2011).

Finally, and somehow paradoxically, by allowing countries to put their national interests above—or at an equal level with—development, Southernisation has been helping donor agencies to cope with the challenges of rising populism at home. Thus, it also has its silver lining (Gulrajani 2018; Kharas and Rogerson 2017).

Since the decline of the GPEDC as a *global* forum, developments in the South have also contributed to the move towards scenario D of a weaker and uncoordinated aid regime. Some Southern EPs have in *practice* reinforced their profile as providers. China, by far the most important, has continued to increase the volume and scope of the cooperation it provides, particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative. By launching a cooperation agency and spearheading the creation of new multilateral development banks, China has also engaged in institution-building. In a sense, it is creating the scaffolding for an alternative aid regime in competition with the West, reviving thus the possibility of a Cold War-like scenario in which two groups of donors compete for the allegiance of RCs (Bracho 2018b). Other Southern EPs, such as India and Turkey, have also maintained or increased important volumes of development cooperation (DEVEX 2019).

But neither they nor China have assumed a coherent Southern provider identity and narrative. Indeed, their discourse often shifts radically according to the audience and/or the venue. Moreover, now that the economic boom of the early years of the century is over, the Southern provider agenda has actually moved backwards in some countries and regions, particularly in Latin America. The two main providers of the region have fallen into dire straits: The Venezuelan economy has collapsed entirely, and Brazil, now in a deep recession, has turned its back on Lula da Silva's activist policies towards the South. At the same time, Chile's and Uruguay's badly managed graduations from ODA have helped to push them and other upper-middle-income countries, including Mexico, into recipient mode.20 Not only has the agenda of the Southern providers not advanced in Latin America, but it has also given way to a new narrative of *development in transition*, which is geared to justify why the high-middle-income countries of the region are still in need of development cooperation (Barcena et al. 2017; OECD et al. 2019).

All these trends came together in March 2019 at the recent Second High-Level UN Conference on SSC: the Buenos Aires Plan of Action plus 40 (BAPA+40). There were some expectations that BAPA+40 would *really* take stock of the massive changes that had occurred in the agenda since the first conference 40 years ago (Bracho 2018a; Klingebiel and Esteves 2018). But although the outcome document recognised the new role of triangular cooperation (Article 28) and advances in the institutionalisation of SSC (Article 26), it failed to acknowledge what arguably is the main novelty in the agenda: the emergence of the Southern provider. This concept appeared once in the original draft in a somewhat weak fashion but soon disappeared altogether. BAPA+40 failed to recognise differentiation among the countries of the South and did not integrate CBDR in its framework, as some important players (Faurie 2018) and observers expected (Klingebiel and Esteves 2018). In balance, BAPA+40 opted for the status quo narrative of scenario A, in which the Southern EPs assume no special responsibilities or commitments towards their poorer or less capable Southern brothers, and in so doing reinforced the downward slide of the whole agenda towards scenario D.

The third factor pushing towards a weaker aid system is *universalisation*. Unlike the MDGs, the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda is for all countries: poor and rich. This shift is the result of a powerful political narrative that regards all countries as being in the same boat, and which recognises that rich countries also face development challenges, and also that the South might be able to assist with the problems of the North (Longhurst 2017). This move towards universality received *universal* praise. Moreover, it was primarily the South—tired of the patronising North—that lobbied for universalisation. But now that the euphoria which accompanied its adoption in 2015 is dissipating, the SDG agenda is beginning to show a number of shortcomings. By deconstructing the North-South divide and treating all countries as "developing", the movement towards universalisation has lost focus on the *real* developing countries and has dissipated responsibilities, reinforcing the narrative and practices of the weaker aid system of scenario D (Bracho 2015; Esteves 2017).

## 17.5 Conclusions

This chapter has shown how the traditional and the Southern EPs briefly agreed on a rough framework on how to "share the burden" in the development effectiveness agenda in Busan. It has also put forward an explanation as to why and how the Busan promise of bringing together all major development cooperation providers under one tent rapidly collapsed. Finally, the essay describes how the collapse of this project could be considered part of the broader erosion of the traditional aid system and the decline of the liberal post-war order. Other authors evaluate these trends more positively. They consider the *erosion* of the aid system to be an *adaptation* to the challenges of new times: for example, the need to mobilise private capital or to counteract populism (Kharas and Rogerson 2017). Or they emphasise the benefits produced by competition from the Southern providers, who bring new resources, ideas, and practices (Greenhil et al. 2016). I do not deny that the erosion of the post-war aid system has to a certain extent been caused by good intentions, nor that it has led to some good outcomes. My main concern is that it is not giving way to an alternative global development cooperation regime.

In his piece in this volume, André de Mello e Souza makes a strong case for such a regime on the grounds of overall efficiency, including the need to tackle inconsistencies among different SDGs. Building on his analysis, I would argue that it is becoming a matter of *survival*. It is true that development cooperation—with or without a regime—contributed little towards achieving the MDGs, as most poverty reduction was achieved by China's ("dirty") economic growth. But development cooperation under a burden-sharing framework that clarifies "who should do what and how" will be crucial to tackling *climate change* and *inequality*, which are the main global challenges that are putting our planet and our civilisation at risk. These challenges cannot be confronted effectively without real collective action. Moreover, as the interdependence and "public bads" have multiplied, development cooperation has become part and parcel of a much broader international cooperation agenda. The principle of "self-differentiation" agreed in the Paris' climate negotiations, in which each country in "a responsible way" defines its own responsibilities, is clearly not enough (Liti Mbeva and Pauw 2016).

It is in this context that, even if development cooperation effectiveness plays a relatively minor role in this broad agenda, the story and analysis of the rise and fall of the Busan promise can provide useful lessons on the types of concerns and arguments that are keeping the International Community from *really* working together. Only thus can development cooperation realise its potential and contribute positively towards achieving the SDGs.

## References

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## Should China Join the GPEDC? Prospects for China and the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation

*Li Xiaoyun and Qi Gubo*

## 18.1 Introduction

Due to their continued reluctance—or even suspicious attitudes, which started right at the beginning of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation (GPEDC) process—four of the five BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) were absent from the second forum, as only

Major parts of this paper were published in Discussion Paper 17/2017 of the German Development Institute (DIE).

Li Xiaoyun was a visiting fellow at the DIE. He holds a Distinguished Professorship of Development Studies at China Agricultural University in Beijing, China. He also chairs the China International Development Research Network (CIDRN), as well as the Network of Southern Think Tanks (NeST). Qi Gubo is a professor at the China Institute for South-South Cooperation in Agriculture/China Belt and Road Institute in Agriculture/College of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University.

X. Li (B) · G. Qi

China Agricultural University, Beijing, China e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
G. Qi e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Russia attended. This has had a big impact on the "global nature" of the partnership (Klingebiel and Li 2016).

After the First High-Level Meeting of the GPEDC—held in Mexico City on 15–16 April 2014 and attended by more than 1500 representatives from 130 countries—the second finally took place more than two years later in Nairobi, from 28 November to 1 December 2016. The GPEDC was launched at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, which was held in Busan, South Korea, in 2011, and proved to be a turning point for international development cooperation. It recognised the increasingly important role of South-South cooperation (SSC) and the existence and relevance of diverse actors and practices of development cooperation (Assunção and Esteves 2014). The first forum, in Mexico City, was aimed to kick off the agenda to transition from aid effectiveness to development effectiveness, whereas the second one came at a critical juncture. This was a moment to review the evidence and lessons learnt from the decade-long attempts to implement the aid- and development-effectiveness agendas, and to look ahead to the role of effectiveness in the new era of sustainable development, anchored in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Blampied 2016). The core value of the GPEDC is to be more open in terms of its agenda and more inclusive in terms of its membership.

Although the Mexico City and Nairobi fora offered a diversified range of participants (developed countries, developing countries, international development organisations, non-governmental organisations, academic institutions, and think tanks), and the focus was changed from aid effectiveness to development effectiveness, the role of the GPEDC has been questioned by some countries and scholars (Ulfgard and Lopez 2016). Some suggest that, although various stakeholders involved in global development actively participated in the fora, the agenda was still under the control of developed countries (Ulfgard and Lopez 2016), which continued to try to bring in more countries to support their development approach, which had already been proven a failure (Li 2017). In addition, the absence of China and India in the two events—and the absence of Brazil and South Africa in the Nairobi forum raised doubts as to the legitimacy of the fora. This signifies that the good intentions of starting an era in which traditional and emerging aid donors can hold talks on a level playing field in development cooperation have failed, and that the transformation of existing international development and cooperation architecture is still under way (Fues and Klingebiel 2014). Kharas (2014) argued during the Busan forum that the Busan meeting symbolised the paradigm shift from "aid effectiveness" to "development effectiveness", and that the increased diversity of participants could cause the further fragmentation of the cooperation plan or put at risk the internal consistency of the process. Besides, Day (2014) is concerned that launching such a negotiation outside the United Nations (UN) Development Cooperation Forum (DCF) will duly affect the legitimacy of the UN. Some have also questioned the effectiveness of the agenda and believe that it will fail to achieve salient results in the immediate future (Glennie 2014).

Contrary to these opinions, many have responded positively with regard to the shift in focus from aid to development towards more openness and inclusiveness. They consider it to be a perfect opportunity to develop a framework that is inclusive, sustainable, and comprised of diverse stakeholders (Atwood 2011, 2012). Chinese scholars are sceptical of the overall initiative, but they agree that the GPEDC provides a new space for China and other like-minded actors to influence global development through learning and sharing (Li et al. 2014). In fact, the GPEDC is one of the important outcomes of the changing global context. The agenda has been seen as a milestone in global development governance (Atwood 2012). It came during a critical era in which the role of new players in global development began to increase while the traditional players began to readjust their strategies. The GPEDC is certainly a new opportunity for all stakeholders to build a more inclusive global development platform, but a pertinent question is: Why did emerging powers decline to take part in it? This chapter aims to assess the reasons why emerging countries have been sceptical about the GPEDC by presenting China's case in particular. The chapter further analyses if the GPEDC is a useful platform for global development and whether all stakeholders can work together under this new structure. Finally, the chapter illustrates how—and under what conditions and circumstances—this can happen.

# 18.2 Critical Accounts

of the History of the GPEDC Some accused China and others of rejecting the opportunities offered by the GPEDC (Li 2017). Some even questioned those countries' commitments to global development, without acknowledging the fact that the emerging countries have been consistently sceptical of the legitimacy of the GPEDC: They do not consider the GPEDC to be a UN forum, as Bena summarised during the Nairobi forum (Bena 2017). The emerging countries have been very careful not to get trapped in the problems that the "Western" partners have, and therefore have avoided being brought into the system. The GPEDC is not just the outcome of the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. Although the openness of the GPEDC is being brought into question less, it is still seen as an attempt by the partnership to remain relevant and merely an extension of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) under a new label (Klingebiel and Li 2016). Therefore, to understand the perspective of the emerging countries on the GPEDC, it is relevant and useful to briefly review the history of the DAC first.

There was a mix of motives that blended the security and protection of US and European global/regional power interests with the "recognition" of a "moral imperative" to assist poor countries (Abdel-Malek 2015, p. 13) during the Cold War. Historically, after the economic rehabilitation of Western Europe (with support from the Marshall Plan) and Japan, they joined the United States in providing development assistance. From the perspective of the United States, it was necessary to build a collective mechanism to coordinate the development aid provided by different countries (Adam 2018), international organisations, and non-governmental organisations. Due to this concern, the United States and its allies co-established the Development Assistance Group, which was set up in January 1960 and had 11 members, including the United States.1 This marked the founding of the "Western" led development cooperation system. It is viewed as the first expansion of the "Western"-led development cooperation system, into which the United States brought its allies to follow the interests of the United States (Li 2017).2 In October 1961, the Development Assistance Group was integrated into the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with a different name—the Development Assistance Committee. To support the work of the DAC, the OECD established a department that consisted of the development financing branch and the technical assistance branch. The development financing office was renamed the Development Assistance Directorate in 1969, and then renamed again as the Development Cooperation Directorate in 1975, which, since then, has been serving as the permanent office and secretariat of the DAC.

The institutionalisation of the DAC marked the formal establishment of the international development cooperation system led by "Western" countries (Li 2017). The primary functions of the DAC are focussed on the following considerations. First, although different aid providers share the same goal, their activities can hardly be termed effective if aid is provided inconsistently or not coordinated among the different countries. Second, among group members that share the same goal, it is difficult for them to honour their promises to provide aid accordingly, without peer pressure. Finally, it is also a challenge to ensure the quality of the assistance programme without a universal standard. Therefore, the DAC adopted a series of standards in 1961 that all members should follow and required that "developed countries should spare 1 per cent of their GNP [gross national product] for development aid". The ratio was then modified to 0.7 per cent, based on the recommendation of the Pearson Report, issued in 1969. In 1993, GNP was replaced by gross national income, but the ratio stayed the same. In addition, the DAC conducted the first evaluation—called a "peer review" today—of its member countries in 1962. Meanwhile, the DAC, aiming to advance the peer review mechanism in a more effective way, established a statistical gathering and reporting system that can be used to compare different donors. However, the establishment of such a mechanism was not only a technical measure to ensure programme quality but, more importantly, a strategic effort to reinforce the political interests of the United States and its allies in the Cold War context (Li 2017).

Furthermore, the United States endeavoured to link the DAC's agenda with the First Development Decade of the UN with the aim of making the development assistance system global and, hence, more legitimate. In the same way, the adoption of the resolution by the UN in October 1970 that "developed countries should spare 0.7 per cent of their GNP as global development resources" further consolidated developed countries' economic power and gave them a more dominant role in international development policy. At the same time, with the support of the United States, the OECD established the Development Centre. Many developed countries hurriedly established think tanks on development issues to provide knowledge bases to make development assistance more technical and depoliticised in order to reduce potential political conflicts (Li 2017). Concepts such as "basic need strategy", "gender and development", "participatory development", "sustainable development", and "poverty reduction", among others, which have all been widely used since the 1970s, all fall into the category of "development knowledge". In the name of "shared values", similar concepts emerged, one after another, by claiming to be neutral—and even sympathetic—towards developing countries, and they won the hearts of a large number of loyal supporters. However, the metaphors about such knowledge could actually be argued as embodying the West's hegemony to a certain degree (Li 2017), and the bureaucratisation of development aid could be seen as covering up the political face and intentions of development aid (Mosse 2011). On the other hand, the development of the GPEDC is also closely related to a growing debate within the DAC member countries on the effect of the development aid provided by DAC members. To respond to the question, all development ministers of the DAC put forward the issue of how to measure aid effectiveness during the ministerial-level meeting in 1995, which later emerged as the "aid-effectiveness agenda". "Halving the global population under extreme poverty" was enacted after the meeting as the central element due to the report "Shaping the 21st Century: The Contribution of Development Cooperation", which was adopted later as a priority of the Millennium Development Goals by the UN.

Later on, at the International Conference on Financing for Development, held in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002, issues concerning the effectiveness of development aid started to draw attention, and the DAC quickly included aid effectiveness into its major work. In February 2003, the DAC held the First High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Rome, Italy. At the forum, DAC members found that the reports they required from recipient countries were an additional burden to them and distracted them from focussing on studying their own development strategies. Therefore, the declaration adopted at the forum raised the concept of "harmonious aid" and established the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness. Meanwhile, the DAC also realised that, in order to improve aid effectiveness, their own efforts would not be enough. As a result, they called for the participation of bilateral institutions, multilateral institutions, governments of developing countries, emerging countries, social organisations, and the private sector (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] 2018). This was the first time that the DAC extended its policy discussion range to the outside. The working group was eventually formed by 80 representatives from the above-mentioned institutions. This was different from the first expansion of the system, in which only the United States and its allies were members. This expansion is viewed as the second expansion of the US-led DAC to include a wide range of stakeholders, signifying that the DAC's influence in the decision-making of aid policies has started to decline (Li 2017).

After the Rome forum (2003), the Working Group on Aid Effectiveness held the Second High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, in Paris in 2005, and issued the Paris Declaration after the forum concluded. The declaration proposed 56 specific measures on issues, including ownership, aid alignment, aid harmonisation, management of results, and mutual accountability. From the author's observation, the most positive contribution to the forum was that the working group started to realise the asymmetric relation between aid and development and tried to fully mobilise recipient countries' initiatives in aid utilisation. Later, in September 2008, the Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness was held in Accra, Ghana, where the Accra Agenda for Action was adopted. The attending parties reached a consensus on how recipient countries should make better use of aid, particularly on how they should rely on their own systems and resources. In November 2011, the working group held the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea. More participating parties attended this forum than any of the previous fora. As a more marketable platform, this forum shifted its attention from aid effectiveness to development effectiveness, which posed unprecedented challenges to the influence and dominant position of the West in the field of international development. To cope with the challenges, the dominant parties, including the DAC, made big concessions in areas including forum documents, issues, and participation mechanisms. Meanwhile, they also hoped to hold their bottom lines by relying on the traditional buy-in approach. Therefore, the GPEDC is viewed as the one partnership agreement that symbolised the third expansion of the DAC-dominated development cooperation system (Ulfgard and Lopez 2016); in essence, it is an exercise of the hidden "buy-in" approach (Li 2017).

## 18.3 Different Views on the Role of the GPEDC

#### *18.3.1 A New Version of Historical Approach of Development Cooperation*

One critical perspective on the GPEDC states that it is unilateral in its approach to history (Li 2017). This examination probably unpacks one side of the story—that the DAC needs to sustain and renew its objective such as "leave no one behind" (OECD 2018). However, it also uncovers another fact: that the change in the global context has changed all global structures, and this change perhaps does not alter the role of international development cooperation, in which the DAC plays an important role in global development. Even in 1996, the DAC had already realised that the distinctions between "the West" and "the East" as well as between "the South" and "the North" were no longer relevant (Abdel-Malek 2015, p. 14). Justifying the legitimacy of the GPEDC is not the purpose of this chapter. Rather, it aims to provide a realistic account of the fact that the GPEDC will have to play an important role in global development, particularly to support the fulfilment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Firstly, the international development cooperation system has focussed on global development based on the ethics of global equality established since the Second World War, despite its political implications and "Western" domination. It has been, perhaps, the only means to transfer resources to balance the unequal wealth distribution between rich and poor countries, at least according to its stated intentions (Hynes and Scott 2013). In reality, the operationalisation of the 2030 Agenda, with its 232 indicators, relies heavily on the traditional concept of official development assistance (ODA) (Mahn 2017). Therefore, from a moral perspective, the system should be improved rather than undermined. This should be the basis upon which consensus can be reached among different parties; in fact, the emerging powers have endorsed it. A total of \$4.02 trillion of ODA was contributed from DAC members from 1960 to 2016 in order to promote the economic development and welfare of developing countries, according to ODA data from the OECD (OECD 2019a).

Secondly, despite the argument on the effectiveness of development cooperation, it has a broad scope and wide domain, such as offering support for multilateral activities and institutions, including the UN, humanitarian assistance, food assistance, health, education, etc. It has been indispensable for poor countries. Furthermore, development cooperation also has helped the economic development of many countries such as Korea (from the 1950s to 1980s) and China: from 1980 up to the year 2000, China had become one of the largest recipients of support from bilateral and multilateral channels (OECD 2019b). This was in response to the fast-growing period in the country, although China's growth record alone cannot account for development cooperation's contribution. However, substantial support from the World Bank and Japan for infrastructure cannot be ignored. From 1979 to 2010, the World Bank (2019) had provided a total of \$52.77 billion to China.

Thirdly, the DAC-based development cooperation system has accumulated rich experiences and lessons in almost all aspects of development assistance. Those experiences and lessons cover numerous critical issues such as recognition of knowledge-based programmes, local ownership, using local systems, country-led mechanisms, etc. Important lessons were also learnt about issues such as poor linkages with economic growth, the high costs of management, donor coordination, and fragmentation, among others.

Finally, the system has built up useful knowledge on production systems and also the system for international development-oriented human resources. It is clear that the DAC-based development cooperation system is the major part of the global governance system that has been developed over the last 60 years. It is expected to continue its vital role in global development with its strong comparative advantages because it has rich experiences and existing adaptive institutions.

#### *18.3.2 The Complementary Role of Emerging Powers*

There is also another narrative: that the emerging players should take a stake in—or even lead—the international development process due to its increasing economic role in the global system. However, this view does not account for the real capacity of emerging powers. Firstly, the economic capacities of all emerging powers3 are still weak compared to those of the DAC members. Taking China as an example—the most developed country in the emerging group—its average gross domestic product per capita is still 30 per cent less than that of the United States and other DAC members. It is unrealistic to expect those countries to take a leading role in global development from a financial point of view. The total amount of ODA provided by 29 emerging countries in 2014 was only about \$32 billion, compared to \$150.8 billion of the 28 DAC members—although their contributions have increased (OECD 2019b). Secondly, the emerging powers (Benn and Luijkx 2017), in particular China, have provided alternative development experiences. This, however, can only be a complementary model because their engagement with other developing countries has not been as intensive and extensive as that of the traditional donors. They also have less experience in international development than the traditional donors. Thirdly, the emerging powers' engagement with other developing countries is less systematic than that of the traditional donors in terms of knowledge production, management, and human resources supply. Lastly, the emerging powers' approach to engaging with other developing countries is mainly through trade and investment rather than development cooperation. Therefore, the role of emerging powers in international development can only be complementary to the existing development cooperation structure.

#### *18.3.3 The UN DCF and the GPEDC*

Another argument for the GPEDC is the role of the UN DCF. There are two perspectives on this: One, from a political point of view, is that there is already a UN platform for discussing development cooperation issues. China, India, and Brazil believe that the UN forum is more internationally legitimate for discussing development cooperation than the "OECD-led" forum, which is not considered to be as globally inclusive (Abdel-Malek 2015, p. 180). Another perspective refers to the issue of efficiency (Janus et al. 2014). Some argue that it wastes resources when two systems focus on the same issue. Synergies and complementariness between accountability mechanisms for development cooperation and those for the 2030 Agenda remain limited, and the established accountability frameworks for development cooperation, such as the GPEDC, are currently missing a linkage to global accountability (Mahn 2017). The debate from both perspectives is sensible, and the full utilisation of the UN platform for discussing development cooperation should be explored further.

We consider, indeed, it is true that the UN DCF is the legitimate platform, and that the GPEDC should not—and cannot—replace the role of the UN DCF. However, one should also take note that, historically, the DAC has provided strong support for the UN DCF and is very knowledgeable of the functions of the UN DCF through both its financial and knowledge support structures. It is due to this over-exercised role of the DAC in international development that many feel uncomfortable. Realistically—along with the consensus to make more viable reforms to strengthen the role of the UN platform in international development—by making the DAC more open and inclusive so that the DAC does not belong exclusively to the 28 DAC members, the GPEDC stands for its legitimacy.

However, the UN platform is often considered inefficient for consensusmaking purposes, thus intermediate mechanisms would still be necessary in order to propose agendas and be attached to the UN as a functional mechanism. The GPEDC can be developed for this role. From a global development perspective—particularly from that of countries whose social and economic development still require financial support from the development cooperation modality—although the amount of development cooperation or ODA on balance is smaller than many other resources, it is the unique altruistic character of the intentional development of public resources (Strawson 2015, p. 6). The reality is that large parts of development cooperation can still—even for emerging powers—be channelled in a bilateral manner.

However, there is a need for a collective agenda and an agreement to ensure that both the strategy and implementation are more coordinated in order to ensure efficiency and effectiveness within development cooperation. Therefore, from all perspectives, instead of maintaining the DAC's hegemonic role, it is important to support the DAC-led development cooperation move towards more openness and inclusiveness—thus, the GPEDC is the first step in this direction.

## 18.4 Towards Genuine Partnership: What Can We Do?

Making the GPEDC more legitimate in terms of the participation of emerging powers requires efforts from both sides. In this regard, the first step is to reduce the suspicions about the intentions of the DAC on behalf of the emerging powers. The priority of creating mutual understanding should be conducted with further formal and close communication through a series of conferences and workshops. The OECD-DAC was seen by the emerging powers to have an inherent bias favouring OECD-DAC members and as being bent on applying its aid principles and modalities worldwide, as Abdel-Malek highlights (Abdel-Malek 2015, p. 180). Thus, they see the GPEDC as another form of the DAC's expansion of this historical process. The emerging powers think that the GPEDC is the strategic way to buy-in the emerging powers in order to share the heavy burden that the DAC has accumulated over the decades. Therefore, the emerging powers have been reluctant to join, or have even rejected the offer. The emerging powers need to recognise that the DAC has recognised the changing context, even since the middle of the 1990s, as reflected in the DAC's 1996 "21st Century Report". From the DAC's viewpoint—and according to the concessions made in the documents in Busan, Mexico City, and Nairobi—the principles for the emerging powers through "differentiated commitment" have been confirmed; SSC is only regarded as being complementary rather than being equally important, as with North-South cooperation. Those principles have helped remove the major obstacles preventing the emerging powers from taking part. Therefore, emerging powers—China in particular, because it has a larger capacity and extensive experience in SSC—should take the GPEDC as an opportunity to form a joint force to play a role in global development.

China has reiterated that it was and has been the creator, benefactor, as well as supporter of global governance. In the 1920s, China was the first country that appealed to the international community for financial and technical support. From 1929 to 1941, the League of Nations provided technical support to China (Ali and Zeb 2016). The GPEDC is certainly a part of the global governance structure, thus China should be a part of it; otherwise, China would not be able to be involved in policy-making conducted by the GPEDC. Secondly, despite the political arguments, the GPEDC originates from the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. The agenda and main context presented in both fora still reflect aid-focussed issues and still largely reinforce the traditional donor–recipient model (Li 2017).

The relatively narrow OECD-DAC aid-effectiveness agenda is viewed as being inadequate to address the issues resulting from broad development cooperation (Abdel-Malek 2015, p. 180). Because of the limitations of the mandate and capacity of the DAC, it is also difficult—and unrealistic—to expect development ministries of the DAC members to move completely beyond an aid agenda.

The emerging powers also need to understand that aid is a business that involves many stakeholders. Changing the nature of aid-development cooperation would require changing the capacities of both institutional and individual structures as well as the whole portfolio structure within the DAC system. The difficulty is that, unless the agenda and context are focussed on development, the active participation of emerging powers is unlikely to happen.

The emerging powers, in particular China, believe that promoting development for developing countries requires different discussions that should relate to how development cooperation can promote trade, investment, agriculture, and industrialisation so that economic growth can be accelerated. Under this scenario, both sides would need to find consensus on how to move ahead.

The third issue varies slightly from the second issue. The original purpose of the World Food Programme was to strengthen the collective action and commitment of DAC members. Therefore, a series of requirements and indicators for data collection and reporting were enacted for monitoring and evaluation purposes. The GPEDC agreed that emerging powers would not need to follow these requirements. However, this privilege would demoralise the emerging powers if they were not able to present the data publicly.

Fourthly, even if they were to actively join the GPEDC, the emerging powers would feel that their development narratives could not be fully recognised because of their weak knowledge base, compared to the strong voices of DAC-based research institutes. Despite the changes made by the GPEDC agenda, conventional political and technical language still dominates the entire agenda.

Finally, the strength of emerging powers is also gradually being presented through those Global South-linked funding institutions such as the India– Brazil–South Africa Forum, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and the New Development Bank (NDB). Active support and participation from OECD member states in these institutions could show a more sincere commitment towards more equal cooperation. However, from the case of the refusal of the United States and Japan to join the AIIB, it shows that the gap between traditional actors in international development assistance and the new players is still stubborn and cannot be filled automatically. However, this also presents another opportunity for DAC members to explore whether DAC-led development cooperation can be joined with those new development financing modalities. Concretely, the GPEDC should approach the NDB and the AIIB and invite them to take part in the forum to explore ways of how they could work together.

Based on the above analysis, one can see that there are various obstacles hindering the emerging powers from actively participating. However, the commitment made by all parties towards global development, in particular the SDGs, and the strong claims of the GPEDC to contribute to the SDGs (and also the agreement of a "common goal but differentiated responsibility" between the DAC members and the emerging powers envisaged in the GPDEC process) by making the GPEDC more inclusive and effective in supporting the SDGs should be the concrete step that encourages the participation of the emerging powers.

## 18.5 Recommendations for the GPEDC

The chapter offers China as the case example in order to provide the following recommendations for the GPEDC to move ahead. Although the emerging powers have behaved similarly towards the GPEDC, they are not coordinated in their foreign policy, and there is no common policy towards the GPEDC among them. The GPEDC should not categorise "the emerging powers" as being one and the same, but it should discuss the issues separately with each in order to understand their different viewpoints on the GPEDC.

Firstly, China has demonstrated a strong commitment to global development. It has claimed to be the creator, benefactor, and developer of global governance (Jiang 2017). China's SSC programmes have been increasingly more aligned with the model advocated, practised, and led by the DAC in terms of modalities. Taking part in the GPEDC should be the focus of China, rather than being brought in passively. China should take the GPEDC as an opportunity to exercise its "soft power". China's development experiences have been highly regarded by the GPEDC, and China can certainly make significant contributions to the paradigm shift of the GPEDC from aid to development. However, the importance of the GPEDC to China's own interests has not been recognised by the Chinese side for two reasons. Firstly, the message of the GPEDC has not been presented properly within the Chinese foreign policy and think tank community; thus, the GPEDC still lacks policy attention in China. Second, due to the fragmentation of the development cooperation policy process in China, the designated institution-to-institution approach routinely applied by development ministries to China does not sufficiently ensure the acknowledgement of the GPEDC by a wide range of institutions relating to decision-making in China. Therefore, it is important to strengthen the linkage via think tank research and policy advocacy to advertise the GPEDC in existing policy dialogue via separate DAC members with China, such as Sino-German and Sino-UK dialogues.

Secondly, the GPEDC should propose a concrete field that China might be interested in. For instance, for the next high-level forum, the topic on how development cooperation could better contribute to China's "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI) could be suggested as one of the topics. China sees this programme as being a concrete measure to implement its global development commitment, and it has also asked for its own development cooperation programme to align with the BRI. The newly established China International Development Cooperation Agency, which was formally launched on 18 April 2018, also stated that it will support national foreign affairs strategy and BRI.

Thirdly, the GPEDC should realise that its legitimacy largely depends on the active participation of the emerging powers, thus the GPEDC should set up a working group to begin talks with the emerging powers to ensure their participation via process approaches rather than just event-based ones; the emerging powers'—even China's—capacities and human resources are limited, and they are not ready to provide an immediate response.

Lastly, the GPEDC also needs to realise that many topics listed in the working programme are not the primary interest of the emerging powers. For instance, the GPEDC continues to focus on the "aid management" agenda, and a strong linkage between development cooperation and development is still missing. The GPEDC needs further concessions to dispel the impression that it is another form of the DAC. Moreover, importantly, the GPEDC needs to highlight clearly how it can link with the UN DCF and other platforms such as the G20 Development Working Group.

## 18.6 Conclusions

The rapid development of emerging countries is not only changing the global political and economic landscape, but also reshaping the architecture of global development governance through initiatives such as the BRICS' NDB and AIIB. The emerging powers influence the global development agenda mainly via what they called the SSC approach, which emphasises trade and investment in development, whereas the GPEDC largely focusses on an aid-based development cooperation system, and its agenda is still largely to provide aid.

However, due to the fact that the GPEDC has moved towards a development-effectiveness agenda and the emerging powers have influenced global development via a developmental approach; there appears to be an opportunity to persuade different forces to contribute to the SDGs. To do this, both sides need to overcome difficulties via understanding the realities and demands of each side and take concrete steps towards a truly genuine partnership.

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## South Africa in Global Development Fora: Cooperation and Contestation

### *Elizabeth Sidiropoulos*

## 19.1 Introduction

South Africa's engagement in global development mirrors the tensions between contestation and cooperation that have come to characterise development cooperation. South Africa is both an ardent proponent of a rules-based order and multilateralism and an advocate for system reform. The latter necessitates contestation not only in existing institutions regarding where normand rule-making power rests, but also contestation of the rules and the system taking place via the establishment of parallel processes or institutions.

South Africa has worked with the rest of Africa to build up African agency in international development. It participates in many traditional fora and it works with other, less formal (or new) institutions that focus on development. South Africa is present in many of the sites of contestation that the opening chapter of this volume refers to. It is also present in the new sites of contestation and institution formation.

First, this chapter provides a brief overview of the drivers and philosophy of South Africa's engagement in global development cooperation (for more detail, see Sidiropoulos [2019]). Second, it explores examples where the country has been engaged in regime- or institution-shifting and institution or regime creation. Third, it outlines what has driven South Africa's own development cooperation strategy since 1994 in the context of South-South cooperation (SSC). Fourth, the chapter documents Africa's growing agency

409

E. Sidiropoulos (B)

South African Institute of International Affairs, Johannesburg, South Africa e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2021

S. Chaturvedi et al. (eds.), *The Palgrave Handbook of Development Cooperation for Achieving the 2030 Agenda*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57938-8\_19

in this field, which has created both greater contestation in some fora and the potential—through Africa's voice—to improve governance structures and make them more inclusive in a substantive rather than a token way. Finally, it argues that contested cooperation is an expected and necessary part of the process that the global system is undergoing, as it moves to reform and, in some instances, reconstruct new forms of global governance. In this interregnum, what role should middle powers such as South Africa play? In the past, South Africa's bridge-building role has been invaluable in overcoming impasses. Can it regain such a "pivot" role in a climate of global polarisation, which makes comprehensive coordination around global frameworks such as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development more difficult?

## 19.2 Philosophy and Drivers of South Africa's Global Development Engagement

Post-apartheid South Africa regarded itself as an African state as well as a Global South state in terms of its identity. The governing African National Congress's (ANC) world view is that of a global contestation of forces, of which the untransformed global governance system is the prime example. In the global development terrain, the ANC still views the world as divided into two camps, with "imperialism [having] mutated into a sophisticated system in the globalised world" where "globalisation [… is] being shaped by the agenda of the dominant global forces" and where "an exploitative socioeconomic system rules the world" (African National Congress [ANC] 2007, Introduction). Thus, priorities for the ANC are Southern solidarity, African development, and reform of global governance (Flemes 2009; Grobbelaar 2014).

These factors are considered to be undermining the system of global governance by eroding its legitimacy, which should derive from the integrity of the system to promote and protect a fair and level playing field. They explain the constant focus of both the ANC and the government it leads on global governance reform, which includes trade rules, the international financial institutions, and the UN Security Council. Yet, the new South Africa was also the poster-child of the post-Cold War "end of history" paradigm with its peaceful and negotiated transition to democracy and a human rights-based constitution.

For the ANC, the emerging Southern powers are important partners in this contestation. The ANC's national conference resolutions in 2017 note that the

emergence of growing economic powers, especially China, India and Brazil have a perspective that is informed by their respective struggles. They are inclined to acting multilaterally and therefore share our commitment to rebuilding and transforming all the institutions of global governance. (ANC 2017, p. 58)

South Africa's own aspirations to African (and Southern) leadership, and the underlying world view of the political elite, chafed at a world, rules, and institutions that are shaped by the United States and Northern/Western dominance. Nevertheless, South Africa believed in international engagement to reform the system, rather than direct and outright confrontation. Considered as an emerging regional power, South Africa has been pragmatic in its engagement, often seeking to build consensus in international fora rather than adopting polarising positions.

A number of phases can be discerned in South Africa's global engagement since 1994. The first phase, lasting until the early 2000s, saw South Africa rejoin all the international governance fora, most notably the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Its actions in those fora were intended to contribute to better outcomes in these institutions for developing countries, and specifically Africa. However, it was in the area of security that South Africa made an impression, working to ensure the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review is successful, and on the adoption of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention. During this period, South Africa was also an active player in the Millennium Declaration Summit. This was the phase of constructive engagement with the existing institutions, taking back its place after the decades of apartheid exclusion.

The second phase emerged in the early 2000s and was characterised by South Africa's exploration of the creation of additional mechanisms that reflected its Global South perspective—such as IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa)—and coalitions within traditional global governance structures that enabled a push-back against the dominant Western perspectives and processes in bodies such as the World Trade Organization (where a group of developing countries that were also agricultural producers formed a negotiating coalition around the extent and ambition of agricultural trade reforms) (see Davies 2019). This was also accompanied by the creation of new African continental institutions such as the African Union (AU) and the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). These institutions were intended to help Africa's voice be heard more clearly in the established global fora. As such, over the course of the subsequent decade, they became catalysts for driving some change in the way in which Africa was received at the global level (see below).

The third phase emerged from about the time of South Africa's joining of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) in 2011.1 The BRICS group was seen by many in both the developed and the developing world as a counterpoint to the G7. China's presence in the BRICS ensured that this grouping (as opposed to IBSA) would have much greater clout in global fora. In this third phase, South Africa, together with the other BRICS, pushed for reforms of the international financial institutes.

Until the mid-2000s, South Africa played a bridge-building role quite successfully. As a middle-sized developing country, South Africa's global influence can only be advanced through assiduous relationship-building across dividing lines around common interests (Schoeman 2015). That role was less in evidence in the Jacob Zuma period (Masters 2017). In the Zuma administration, there was much more foreign policy hype about South Africa's membership in the BRICS, although this was linked to its potential to help meet Africa's developmental challenges (Sidiropoulos et al. 2018).

During this period, South Africa was perceived to be ramping up its contestation in global fora, if only because its deepening political relations with the BRICS and China (and to some extent Russia), in particular, saw the country adopting positions in global fora that seemed to avoid upsetting its bigger partners—its position on the South China Sea dispute, in which it adopted the Chinese position on resolving issues bilaterally, or the annexation of Crimea, in which it chose to abstain from voting in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

In the post-Zuma administration, South Africa faces specific challenges in its regime- and institution-creation actions. China's more assertive foreign policy and power projection, witnessed most illustratively in its 70th anniversary celebrations in September 2019, is seeing it chart a more independent path, not limited to its cooperation within the BRICS. The establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the enunciation of the Belt and Road Initiative are two examples of China's own "outside options" beyond the BRICS, where the gap between it and developing economies widens, and concomitantly their respective interests diverge.

South Africa's commitment to the principles of SSC was strongly articulated at the Second High-level United Nations Conference on South-South Cooperation, also known as BAPA + 40 (Buenos Aires Plan of Action plus 40), held in Buenos Aires in March 2019. There, South Africa supported the point that SSC was complementary to North-South cooperation, while also recognising that triangular cooperation was a "beneficial, complementary modality of development cooperation with great potential for enriching partnerships" (Institute for Global Dialogue [IGD] 2019, p. 2.). The linkages made between the SSC agenda and the 2030 Agenda were also important, as was the reiteration of the principles of SSC agreed at the 2009 Nairobi Conference. The calls for accountability and impact assessment remained contentious in the light of the demand-driven nature of SSC, but South Africa

supported the view that an impact assessment of SSC initiatives, as well as their monitoring and evaluation, should be undertaken as the need arises rather than imposing a common template, especially in view of the variations in configurations and patterns and the extent of the demands by partner countries. (IGD 2019, p. 3)

South Africa has also been a strong proponent of the view that SSC can only be driven by the countries of the Global South. It is a product of the South and should be respected as such (IGD 2019).

# 19.3 South Africa's

Regime-/Institution-Shifting or Creation From its early enunciations on the need for an African Renaissance and its seminal contribution to the adoption of NEPAD, and subsequently the establishment of a coordinating agency of the same name (NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency), South Africa identified the imperative of African development as central to many of its international engagements. South Africa was interested in both the substance of the global development debate to ensure that African positions were well-articulated, and its architecture, which it believed should provide greater space for developing economies in its decision-making processes.

As such, South Africa has been active in the various platforms focusing on development—from the High Level Forums (HLFs) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)/Development Assistance Committee (DAC) (culminating in Busan in 2011) in the 2000s to the UNled processes on sustainable development (including the hosting of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002), Financing for Development, the Development Cooperation Forum, and the G20's Development Working Group (DWG). Development has also been on the agenda of two clubs to which South Africa belongs: IBSA and the BRICS.

In addition, since 2001, South Africa has been a provider of SSC via its African Renaissance and International Cooperation Fund (ARF). It was established with start-up funding of \$30 million. Its goal was to promote democracy and good governance, socio-economic development and integration, and resolution of conflicts, among others, in Africa (Sidiropoulos 2012, p. 226).

This section focuses on a number of sites of contestation where South Africa is active in the global development discourse and divides them into those that can be termed regime- or institution-shifting and those that are regime- or institution-creating. South Africa's interaction with formal institutions such as the UN and the OECD-DAC High Level Forums and the Global Partnership on Effective Development Co-operation (GPEDC) is part of attempt at institution-shifting, whereas IBSA and BRICS mechanisms and institutions are institution-creating. Its own development cooperation initiatives have spanned peace-building (an area that traditionally has fallen outside SSC activities, but has been the focus of Northern development cooperation) and humanitarian relief and capacity-building, among others.

#### *19.3.1 UN Processes*

South Africa has always been unequivocal in stating that the "United Nations remains the most inclusive and transparent means to advance development cooperation". South Africa considers ECOSOC (United Nations Economic and Social Council) the "principal body for coordination, policy review, policy dialogue and recommendations on economic and social development […]" (IGD 2013, p. 8). At the UN, South Africa's actions reflect its view that the UN requires reforms to ensure that developing countries have more say, but it does not question its legitimacy as the apex global governance body. In that sense, it is involved in regime- or institution-shifting with regard to the UN.

South Africa's major entry into the UN global sustainable development arena was its hosting of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in 2002. It was a high-water mark for the country's diplomacy.2 An important outcome of the WSSD was the integration of the three pillars of sustainable development (social, economic, and environmental), with the country arguing strongly that poverty eradication needed to be at the heart of sustainable development (Mashabane 2018, p. 404; Schroeder 2002, p. 34).

South Africa's role on development matters in the UN has been projected often through its holding of various positions, most notably as chair of the G77 + China (2006 and 2015). In 2006, as chair of the G77 + China, South Africa "forcefully challenged" US efforts to water down the development proposals in the World Summit Outcome Document, while a decade later it played a constructive role in ensuring the 2030 Agenda was adopted by consensus (Mashabane 2018, p. 405). In a book on the inside story of the negotiations of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the authors note that "the chair of the G77 is perhaps the second most important multilateral post after the President of the UN General Assembly" because members in the UNGA usually look to the G77 to draft initial resolutions (Kamau et al. 2018, p. 10).

Earlier, in January 2013, the UNGA president appointed South Africa and Ireland to coordinate preparations for the Special Event scheduled for September 2013 to follow up on efforts made towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which had been agreed at the UNGA High Level Plenary Meeting on the MDGs in 2010.

South Africa has been elected twice to serve as a member of the UN's ECOSOC (2004–2006 and 2013–2015). With regard to its latter term on ECOSOC, South Africa saw the period leading up to the post-2015 agenda as a crucial one and regarded ECOSOC's role in coordinating the various processes as key (IGD 2013, p. 8). South Africa has always advocated for the strengthening and further reform of ECOSOC so that it is better placed to tackle global challenges and the needs of developing countries (IGD 2013, p. 8).

South Africa was a strong proponent of the MDGs and what the Millennium Summit and Declaration promised, seeing it as carrying the potential to create a better life for all. President Thabo Mbeki said at the time: "The fundamental challenge that faces this Millennium Summit is that, credibly, we must demonstrate the will to end poverty and underdevelopment" (cited in Zondi 2017, p. 129). South Africa also championed the development of African capacity to generate its own data to monitor the MDGs. Nevertheless, a deficit in data to inform policy and track the SDGs continues to be a challenge for many African states in the post-2015 landscape.

Although South Africa worked constructively on the adoption of the SDGs, it has also argued strongly that the work of the MDGs still needs to be completed. The new set of goals and indicators should not supersede the MDG targets where these remain unfulfilled. Together with the other African countries, South Africa advocated that the "unfinished business" of the MDGs needs to be completed. At the 2013 UNGA, President Zuma set out South Africa's key concerns for both the content and the rules of a post-2015 agenda. These included the need to fully implement the MDGs and that this should remain a priority in the post-2015 landscape. He again emphasised that all three dimensions of sustainable development should be integrated: "eradication of poverty through economic development, social development and environmental sustainability" (Zuma 2013, para. 18). In addition, South Africa supported the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities between developed and developing economies. Zuma argued this in the context of what he explained as the "tendency to attempt to delegate some of these historical responsibilities to new emerging economies in the South". He said this was "unacceptable and unworkable as such emerging nations have their own historical challenges and backlogs to deal with" (Zuma 2013, para. 27).

South Africa was the co-facilitator of the UN Financing for Development Forum (FfD) in 2017 together with Belgium. The first forum in 2016 had produced a procedural text that had not covered all the chapters of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA). When South Africa took over the co-facilitation together with Belgium, they aimed to get agreement on a substantive text in the UN Inter-Agency Task Force on Financing for Development (IATF) on financing for development that focused on a balanced approach to all chapters in the AAAA. South Africa believed that, if the forum was to advance development, the follow-up meetings could not only focus on certain elements but ignore others. Furthermore, South Africa's position in the negotiations was that this forum should not focus only on official development assistance (ODA) commitments— FfD was not about measurement but about financing. South Africa also stood firm against efforts by some countries to push the Busan principles into the document. The discussion on trade was also difficult. There had been a number of commitments in the AAAA, including those on strengthening the multilateral trading system, facilitating international trade, and promoting trade policy coherence. The IATF report was not able to significantly take these issues forward; rather, it resorted to the language that had been used in the AAAA. Overall, during its co-facilitation, South Africa was keen on strengthening the IATF report so that it provided concrete recommendations to member states to speed up implementation.

In advancing its cause of a greater voice for Africa and more inclusive global governance, South Africa has made use of a number of instruments—from hosting major global events to chairing groupings within the UN, and helping to shape the agendas.

#### *19.3.2 The OECD and the DAC*

For many countries in the South, the OECD is considered a rich man's club that has tried to assimilate emerging economies into its structures and encourage them to adopt rules and norms developed previously by its members. This outreach has been partially successful over the years, with a few developing economies joining its membership. The first of these was Mexico, but more recently, it has been followed by South Korea and Chile, with Costa Rica and Colombia on the candidate list for accession.

South Africa has been part of the OECD's enhanced engagement, or outreach, which includes four other emerging economies—China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil—and which began in 2007. Much of this engagement relates to domestic issues, such as macroeconomic policies and structural reforms; however, South Africa has worked with the OECD on its regional initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa, including as vice co-chair of the NEPAD-OECD African Investment Initiative. It is also active in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Regional Investment Policy Framework and the OECD–African Development Bank Group initiative to support business integrity and anti-bribery efforts in Africa. South Africa is also an associate of the BEPS (base erosion and profit-shifting) project.

Yet, although South Africa recognises the technical value of its various engagements with the OECD, it has chosen not to join it. The developing countries that have joined it see their admission to the group as a mark of their developmental success.3 South Africa and other developing countries, such as India, consider the OECD—and especially its Development Assistance Committee (DAC)—as a bastion of Western-created rules that should not be foisted upon developing countries, especially in relation to monitoring, measuring, and evaluating their SSC (Sidiropoulos 2012, p. 236).

In addition, the OECD's role in global economic governance has grown over the years, especially in its interaction and engagement with the G20, which often looks to it for technical support. Because the G20 does not have a formal Secretariat, the OECD partly fills that role in practice, positioning itself as a global policy network with wide-ranging expertise. Although this has proved extremely useful to G20 and other processes, a number of South African officials in the past have raised concerns that the absence of well-resourced institutions from the Global South means that policy advice and input into the G20 process is still shaped by Northern-dominated organisations, notwithstanding the fact that the G20—with its more diverse membership—should differentiate itself from the traditional orthodox global policy prescriptions.

Thus, South Africa objects to the dominance of a Northern-constructed and dominated organisation exercising a significant role both in the evolution of global public goods and in the development cooperation field.

South Africa is an emerging donor, but it does not report on its development cooperation to the OECD's Development Assistance Committee. Historically, after 1994, South Africa played an important role in the OECD-DAC meetings—and specifically the HLFs, starting with Rome and culminating in Busan in 2011—as a recipient.

In its dual role of being both a donor and a recipient, however, it has adopted an approach at the political level emphasising that the metrics created by the traditional aid donors to monitor and evaluate their development cooperation cannot be applied to SSC. South Africa argues that much of SSC is not financial, but technical, in-kind, or a contribution to global public goods (e.g. peace-building) (Klingebiel 2018; Lalbahadur and Rawhani 2017). The DAC system does not provide for the tracking and evaluation of that kind of cooperation through its focus on monetisation.

In 2015, the OECD spearheaded a process to develop a universal standard to track contributions to the SDGs—the Total Official Support for Sustainable Development (TOSSD). A number of developing countries opposed the OECD's engaging in this process. At a political level, the South Africa government prefers the UN's Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators, and indeed at the UN in New York, TOSSD is perceived as a product of the DAC.4 There is concern that TOSSD is another way of camouflaging ODA and reducing it overall.

In the OECD-DAC, South Africa in the early 2000s was instrumental in coordinating a more harmonised African voice in the HLFs that began with Rome in 2003 and ended with Busan in 2011.

#### *19.3.3 Clubs—G20*