The production of soft power: practising solidarity in Brazilian South–South development projects

Abstract

Brazil's development cooperation and solidarity discourse have been portrayed as soft power resources. However, few studies have analysed how Brazil implements development cooperation, and soft power theory itself suffers from a lack of empirical evidence. This article looks at the perceptions of participants in three Brazilian projects, particularly how soft empowerment is manifested through the demand-driven and horizontality approaches to development cooperation. I contend that these approaches have produced a positive image among the “recipients”, and I show that their perceptions of development cooperation emphasise the style, rather than the completion, of project activities.

Résumé

La coopération au développement et le discours de solidarité du Brésil ont été caractérisés comme des ressources de la puissance douce ou soft power. Toutefois, peu d’études ont analysé comment le Brésil met en pratique la coopération au développement et la théorie du soft power souffre quant à elle d'un manque de preuves empiriques. Cet article se penche sur les perceptions des participants dans trois projets brésiliens, particulièrement sur la manière dont l'autonomisation douce ou soft empowerment se manifeste à travers les approches de la coopération au développement centrées sur la demande et l'horizontalité. Je soutiens que ces approches sont vues positivement par les « récipiendaires » et je montre que leurs perceptions de la coopération au développement mettent en exergue le modèle du projet plutôt que ses résultats.

Keywords:

• Brazil
• soft power
• South–South cooperation
• biofuels

Notes

1. See SEGIB (2009–2012), South Centre (2009), SU-SSC (2009), UNDP (2009), Cabral and Weinstock (2010), Davies (2010), UNCTAD (2010), Chandy and Kharas (2011), Park (2011), Walz and Ramachandran (2011), Zimmermann and Smith (2011), Burges (2012), Chaturvedi, Fues, and Sidiropoulos (2012), Chin and Quadir (2012), Dauvergne and Farias (2012), Inoue and Costa Vaz (2012), Iselius and Olsson (2012), Mawdsley (2012), de Mello de Souza (2012), Christensen (2013), Mawdsley, Savage, and Kim (201 4), Burges (2014a).

2. On its website, the ABC refers to its cooperation with developing countries (Cooperação entre Países em Desenvolvimento) as South–South cooperation or horizontal cooperation interchangeably.

3. While it is not the author's wish to make further use of Northern donors’ jargon, the term “recipient” or “recipient country” will be used in this paper with the sole justification that the term “partner” might be unclear, as this term refers to both the donor and the recipient in the SSC vocabulary.

4. Northern aid has been criticised for being donor-driven and for reflecting underlying geopolitical and commercial interests (Rowlands 2008; Chandy and Kharas 2011; SEGIB 2011). The conditionalities that were particularly visible during the structural adjustment decade have been regarded as reflective of the asymmetries in relations between Northern donors and Southern “recipients”, while the donor-driven approach has been criticised for disregarding the needs of Southern countries (Woods 2008; Sato et al. 2011).

5. In power theory analysis, soft power has been related to Luke's third face of power (see Digeser 1992).

6. Gallarotti (2010) refers to soft empowerment as the result of the attraction produced.

7. http://www.abc.gov.br/Projetos/CooperacaoSulSul

8. The information available on these two sources is very general, sometimes not stipulating an end date or a budget.

9. In Brazilian law, each project has to be approved by the Foreign Ministry or at the Presidential level of each country in a document called the Ajuste complementar, namely a complementary agreement that is added to the technical cooperation agreement which regulates projects between the two countries. Later, a project document is drawn up.

10. The other seven projects were disregarded because there was no response from the “recipient” countries’ institutions involved in the project (four), because the projects involved triangular cooperation (one) or because they were not consistent with capacity-building projects (two).

11. Here the author refers to the shipment of the selected biofuel crops to the recipient countries.

12. The case of Peru is slightly different. The managing organisation is DEVIDA, but the institution that carries out the experimentation on site is INIA.

13. In this article, quotations from the transcripts have been translated from Spanish into English by the author.

14. While some respondents explicitly stipulated their wish to remain anonymous, others informed the interviewer that they would talk more freely if they knew their names were not going to be cited. Therefore, they will remain anonymous.

15. Joint committee in English.

16. http://www.abc.gov.br/ApresentacaoProjeto/PaisesEmDesenvolvimento#

17. This conclusion about the sustainability of Brazilian projects in terms of lack of time and availability have to be tempered with what Dilma Rousseff's strategy in SSC might suggest: if trade and investment were to be integrated into the activities, the time and availability of the experts might no longer be an issue because of the commercial incentives behind the projects.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sandra Bry

Biographical note

Sandra H. Bry is a PhD candidate at UNEP DTU Partnership (United National Environment Programme – Technical University of Denmark), housed in the Department of Management Engineering, DTU. Her PhD thesis, “South–South Development Cooperation and Soft Power: The Case of Brazil's Foreign Policy and Technical Cooperation”, was successfully defended in November 2014.