Has Spanish international development and aid policy done ‘more with less’? Crisis, horizontal cooperation and complexity

Abstract

By approaching the question of complexity in international development through governance lenses, this article proposes the use of complexity as an innovative and enabling framework for understanding how policy practices emerge in international development and how their use is consolidated by actors who learn in an adaptive way from their policy environment. To apply this conceptual framework, we discuss the case of Spanish international development. Thus, we aim to understand and explain the policy journey through which Spain has started to use new policy practices related to horizontal cooperation with emerging donors in Latin America. The article proceeds by first analysing the political discourse of the Spanish government on international development. Second, we triangulate the initial findings with information coming from peer reviews and survey data, analysing the impact and perceptions of Spanish international development policies. The analysis shows the relevance of a complexity approach when analysing international development governance mechanisms and emerging policy practices. This sheds light on the challenges of the related learning journey, with potential relevance across policy topics in international development.

Keywords:

• Complexity in international development
• adaptability
• governance
• policy practices
• Spanish aid and development policies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A selection of the primary sources used in this study is available in the Supplementary material.

2 Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, and the Dominican Republic.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ileana Daniela Serban

Ileana Daniela Serban is Associate Professor in IR and Politics at Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid, Spain. She was Assistant Professor in Public Policy at King’s College London and a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Political Science at Waseda University, Tokyo. Her research interests include global governance, new forms of international development cooperation, and EU actorness.

Andrea Betti

Andrea Betti is Associate Professor in IR and Politics at Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid, Spain. He has held various academic positions in universities in Spain and Latin America, such as the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO Ecuador, Quito). His main research area is foreign policy analysis, applied to the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy.