Paper short abstract:

Contemporary discourses of South South Cooperation suggest a challenge to northern hegemony from the Global South, but the restatement of this within a context of the globalization of capital and production chains suggests a loss of the radical potential of the original formulation.

Paper long abstract:

The changing geography of poverty and inequality and the emergence of new aid actors have disrupted the neat binaries of developed/developing countries, rich/poor and donor/recipient that underpinned the meaning of development assistance in the second half of the twentieth century. Under the umbrella of BRICS, a group of countries are challenging the whole notion of development that is constructed in the global north at the exclusion of the south. The essence of the challenge to the hegemony of current global governance institutions is an alternative network of organisations, which effectively distinguish 'themselves as knowing from first-hand experience what it is like to do development, as well as to receive aid' (2013). Embedded within the promotion of 'South to South' cooperation (SSC) is the concept of mutual self-interest between development partners and a rejection of dependency relationships based on ex-colonial power relations. A key aspect of the original conceptualisation of SSC in the 1960s was that this should empower states to counter flows of capital that support exploitative economic practices, disrupting the hegemony of traditional northern donors. The contemporary discourse of SSC by contrast sits comfortably within a neoliberal framework, promoting the closer integration of national economies into globalised production chains and global financial flows. Are new forms of South-South Cooperation and public-private partnerships challenging the aid and development model? Or are they bolstering it by mobilizing new sources of ideological legitimacy that promote consent to a process that in fact expands exploitative relationships?