Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses Brazil's South-South development cooperation (SSC) with Africa as a vector for policy transfer. It examines Brazilian foreign and SSC policy change and the role of the time factor in policy travel to explain changes in policy circulation dynamics between Brazil and Africa.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on Brazilian South-South development cooperation (SSC) with the African continent as a vector for policy transfer and circulation. It argues that during the first decades of the new century, Brazilian policies in the fields of agriculture, health, and social protection have travelled to Africa through SSC embedded in a broader circulation of development-related policy knowledges and technologies from Brazil to the developing world. This resulted from strong active state-activism and the mobilisation of policy winning coalitions. This circulation was deeply connected to the attractiveness of Brazilian policy solutions to actors outside Brazil (international organisations and partner governments) and their eagerness to learn from Brazilian experiences, as well as to Brazil showing the necessary authority and capacity to inspire and share. Engaging with questions of policy change and the time factor in policy travel, the paper also explores more recent policy circulation dynamics between Brazil and the African continent. It argues that the simultaneous contraction in Brazilian governmental activism in SSC, since the mid-2010s, and the persistent efforts to consolidate SSC as a policy field in Brazil, have implications to the ways policy travels through cooperation and affects the politics of Brazilian policy circulation in Africa, with the emergence of a new set of dynamics, namely: (i) Brazilian implementing agencies resisting to policy sharing; (ii) ‘trilateralisation’ of Brazilian SSC and policy circulation through UN agencies; (iii) increased focus on hands-on exchanges to pilot of Brazilian policy solutions, instruments and programmes in Africa.