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Coauthored by Manchester colleagues from the Global Production Networks, Trade and Labour group, the paper conceptualises Southern agency in GPNs through adoption, leveraging, reshaping, and crafting, highlighting their engagement with increasingly fragmented trade and production regimes.

Paper long abstract

Debates on the reconfiguration of Global Production Networks (GPNs) are increasingly framed through the lens of US-China rivalry and great power competition. This focus sidelines the increasing and diverse forms of agency exercised by a range of actors across the global South. This paper seeks to conceptualise agency in the GPN approach. In the context of a shift away from a rule-based system towards fragmented, contested, and multi-layered trade and production regies, Southern actors are increasingly re-interpreting, challenging, and selectively engaging with multiple governance arrangements at once, often across scales, while also proposing and crafting alternatives. We argue that Southern agency cannot just be understood in terms of adaptation to structural shifts or as the strategic positioning within existing GPNs, but must instead be conceptualised as a set of situated and multi-scalar practices – adoption, leveraging, reshaping, and crafting – through which actors engage with GPNs in an era of global uncertainty. Drawing on the sectors of agriculture, production, trade, and the digital economy, the paper highlights both new spaces for Southern agency and the persistent constraints imposed by a hierarchical and uneven global economy.

The paper is co-authored by a group of Manchester colleagues part of the Global Production Networks, Trade and Labour group: Elisa Gambino, Rory Horner, Khalid Nadvi, Chris Foster, Matt Alford, Aarti Krishnan, Sophie Van Huellen, Gianluca Iazzolino, Jose Antonio Puppim de Oliveria, Diletta Pergoraro, Jose Camacho Caicedo, Nedson Ng’oma, Hairui Liu, Puji Basuki, and Anifat Ibrahim.

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The paper addresses how state capabilities matter for implementing social policies in multilevel governance contexts having cash transfer programs in Brazil as the main case. Through a mixed-method approach we conclude that more than information local bureaucracies need training to deliver policies.

Paper long abstract

Cash transfer programs have become a paradigmatic means of providing redistributive policies in the neoliberal age. However, the literature has yet to address the role of subnational administrative units in implementing those policies. This study examines why and how the knowledge and use of the tools provided by the Secretariat for Evaluation, Information Management (SAGICAD) of the Brazilian Ministry of Social Development vary among municipalities in Minas Gerais, the second largest state of Brazil. We argue that these variations stem from heterogeneity in local state capacities within the federal-led Unified Social Assistance System (SUAS). A mixed-methods approach was adopted, combining an electronic survey applied to 46 out of 853 municipalities in the state and conducting semi-structured interviews with bureaucrats from SAGICAD at the federal level, and documentary analysis of SAGICAD panels. The findings reveal strong heterogeneity in municipal capacities: the prevalence of small administrative structures, precarious employment ties in bureaucracies, low degree of institutionalization of Social Assistance Surveillance and Permanent Education, and predominantly operational use of informational tools. Despite the high educational level and professional experience of local managers, individual qualification does not fully translate into institutional capacity. SAGICAD's transformative potential depends on strengthening three interdependent pillars related to state capabilities: continuous training, structuring of surveillance units, and stability of technical teams. The study concludes that the main challenge does not lie in access to information but in the capacity to transform data into evidence-based decisions and management practices, thus enhancing the effectiveness of SUAS at the municipal level.

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The paper will examine how Global North and Global South actors construct and maintain narratives to advance climate agendas during global climate negotiations. The research employes a narrative analysis by analyzing official documents, speeches, and discourse of North-South discursive divides.

Paper long abstract

This paper aims to summarize the debates and discussions in recent literature on social movements and activism for climate justice in the Global South, focusing on North-South discursive divides that fundamentally shape global climate negotiations. Climate negotiations continue to be shaped by equity concerns between developed countries in the Global North and emerging economies in the Global South, yet these structural tensions manifest not only in policy outcomes but in competing narrative frameworks. The research seeks to answer the following question: how the discursive divides between Global North and South contribute to or interfere with global climate change negotiations? The paper fills a knowledge gap by highlighting how different actors construct and maintain narratives, while uncovering North-South dynamics that operate through discursive mechanisms. This research employs narrative analysis to examine discursive battles on climate agendas, including but not limited to, climate finance, loss and damage, and climate justice. By analyzing official documents, speeches, and high-level discourse across recent UNFCCC COPs, this research reveals how narrative power determines whose climate futures matter in an increasingly multipolar world order. While Global North narratives tend to emphasize finance mechanisms, technological solutions, and procedural equity, Global South movements articulate counter-narratives centered on developmental priorities, historical responsibility, and livelihood protection. These competing narratives shape not only international negotiations but public perception and policy priorities. Thus, the research will provide systematic evidence of how North-South discursive divides manifest across different actors and geographies and contribute to a new analytical framework.

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This paper analyses how Colombia’s national cooperation agency has redefined a dual-track strategy as both aid recipient and provider, illustrating emerging forms of state-led agency from the Global South in a reconfigured multipolar development landscape.

Paper long abstract

In a reconfiguring international development landscape marked by multipolarity and shifting power relations, actors from the Global South are assuming more complex roles in global development. This paper examines how the Presidential Agency for International Cooperation of Colombia (APC Colombia) has redefined its cooperation strategy in line with Colombia’s position as a dual-transition country—simultaneously a recipient of international cooperation and an emerging provider of development knowledge and technical capacities.

Focusing on institutional agency rather than abstract national agency, the paper analyses how APC Colombia has operationalised a dual-track approach combining traditional aid coordination with South–South and triangular cooperation initiatives. Drawing on policy analysis and selected cooperation experiences, including peacebuilding and institutional strengthening, the paper explores how this strategy reflects broader shifts in Global South engagement with development governance.

The analysis situates Colombia within debates on the “new South” by examining how state-led actors from middle-income countries adapt and reconfigure cooperation practices historically associated with Northern donors, while navigating fiscal, coordination, and prioritisation constraints. The paper contributes to discussions on power and agency in global development by offering an empirically grounded case of how a Global South cooperation agency reimagines development practice beyond traditional North–South binaries.

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This paper analyzes China-Türkiye investment under the BRI. It argues that while China offers developmental opportunities, its rise poses risks of asymmetric dependency. By applying OECD norms (ownership, transparency), Türkiye can mitigate threats and secure a more balanced Southern partnership.

Paper long abstract

Since the 2013 launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Türkiye has emerged as a critical node in the "Central Corridor." However, the relationship has fluctuated due to economic instability, the pandemic, and regional tensions. This paper examines the dual nature of China’s rise as a "Power South" actor, exploring whether its investment model acts as a catalyst for growth or a threat to the economic sovereignty of other Southern states like Türkiye.

Utilizing a historical narrative and case studies—including the 2015 Bilateral Investment Treaty and recent automotive and energy projects—the study evaluates the current momentum of cooperation. Central to the analysis is the potential for "normative convergence." We argue that the risks of asymmetric dependency and the "threat" of Northern-style dominance being replicated by Southern powers can be mitigated by adopting the four OECD principles for aid and investment: ownership, inclusive partnerships, transparency and accountability, and a results-oriented approach.

The paper reveals that China’s compliance with these norms is essential for revitalizing Türkiye’s role in the BRI. By asserting agency through standardized norms, Türkiye can move beyond being a passive recipient of capital to an active partner. Ultimately, the study concludes that the future of Southern-led developmentalism depends on the ability of emerging economies to demand transparency and mutual accountability, ensuring that the "New South" does not simply replicate the hierarchical structures of the old North.

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This paper examines the evolution of Indonesia’s foreign aid practices, showing how emerging Southern states exercise agency by selectively adopting and hybridising Northern and Southern norms, reshaping global development architecture through interconnection rather than opposition.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how emerging donors from the South navigate the Northern dominance in global development architecture by analysing Indonesia’s adoption of a hybrid foreign aid model. While much scholarship frames the “Non-Traditional Southern Donors” as rivals of the Northern model, this paper argues that Southern agency often takes the form of selective adoption and norms hybridisation of Northern aid norms rather than challenging or replacing the existing international development architecture.

The paper analyses the establishment of the Indonesia Agency for International Development (Indonesia AID) and its evolving practices within the South-South and Triangular Cooperation mechanism. It shows how Indonesia selectively adopts the components of the Northern aid model—such as institutionalisation, types of aid, and governance—while simultaneously embedding them within the Southern aid principles of solidarity, non-interference, and mutual benefit. This hybridisation reflects Indonesia’s dual positioning as both an aid recipient and an emerging development partner.

The findings highlight three contributions to debates on the New South in global development. First, it demonstrates that Southern states exercise agency not by exiting Northern-led systems, but by reshaping them from within. Second, it reveals the contemporary evolution of the North-South relationship, where connections with Northern donors remain central even as Southern actors assert normative leadership. Third, the norms hybridisation theory contributes to the literature on the agency of Southern actors towards the dominance of Northern states.

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Shows how education transformation in the New South is reshaping global development as Southern actors claim agency, build coalitions, and lead reform while Northern dominance recedes. Insights from the Network for Education Systems Transformation highlight trust, context, and shared leadership.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines education system transformation as a critical arena in which the New South is reshaping global development. The contraction of Northern aid and the weakening of multilateral leadership have created conditions in which Southern actors assume greater responsibility while redefining the ethical and epistemological foundations of development practice. Education is a revealing lens, since it is both a site of redistribution of power and a site where ideas about knowledge, evidence, and progress are contested.

The paper draws on collaborative work in the Network for Education Systems Transformation, a partnership across ten countries. The analysis focuses on what has been learned from collaboration itself, including how partners negotiate unequal resources, asymmetries of voice, and the tension between local priorities and international expectations. Empirical reflections are drawn from shared learning activities and comparative case discussions across contexts.

The paper advances three contributions. First, it shows how forms of relational leadership grounded in care and reciprocity are emerging within South–South and South–North collaboration. Second, it argues that disagreement and discernment are not obstacles but productive conditions for ethical collaboration. Third, it demonstrates how epistemic trust in contextual knowledge reshapes what counts as valid evidence in education reform.

Overall, the paper contends that education system transformation work in the New South is not simply filling a vacuum left by Northern withdrawal. It is redefining what constitutes improvement, how collaborative decisions are made, and whose knowledge has authority in shaping collective futures.

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Well-being evidence shows that the Global South is no longer uniform. A power South is increasingly oriented toward capability and dignity, while a poor South remains constrained by survival- and aid-driven development models, raising questions about whose development counts.

Paper long abstract

The emergence of a “New South” in global development has coincided with growing divergence within the Global South itself, particularly between a power South and a poor South. While development debates continue to emphasise income growth, aid flows, and aggregate economic indicators, this paper argues that such approaches obscure important inequalities in lived experiences of development. Drawing on selected indicators from the World Values Survey, the paper compares subjective well-being and capability-related measures such as life satisfaction, perceived agency, and institutional trust across illustrative power South and poor South countries. The analysis suggests that power South states increasingly exhibit development trajectories oriented toward capability expansion and well-being, even at comparable income levels, reflecting greater policy autonomy and state capacity. In contrast, the poor South remains largely constrained by survival-oriented and donor-driven development frameworks that prioritise basic needs over broader human welfare. Interpreted through a behavioral political economy lens, the paper highlights how expectations, social norms, and trust shape development outcomes beyond material indicators. By foregrounding well-being as an analytical lens, the paper reveals a growing but underexplored axis of inequality within the Global South and raises critical questions about whose development priorities are recognised and legitimised in an era of declining Northern dominance, shrinking aid budgets and shifting global power relations.

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This paper analyzes the proposed ECO currency as a geopolitical strategy reshaping aid and development in West Africa. Using macroeconomic data from 2019–2023, it examines asymmetries, external influence, and the potential of monetary integration to enhance strategic autonomy by 2027.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how geopolitical shifts in the Global South are reshaping the future of aid through the lens of monetary sovereignty and regional integration, focusing on the case of the proposed ECO currency of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

Building on an analysis of regional macroeconomic indicators between 2019 and 2023, the study identifies structural asymmetries between stronger and more vulnerable economies and assesses their implications for future convergence scenarios projected toward 2027. The paper situates the ECO initiative within broader debates on decolonial development, contested futures, and strategic autonomy, highlighting how monetary integration is increasingly framed not only as an economic project but also as a geopolitical strategy. Particular attention is paid to external power relations—most notably the continued influence of France—and to the challenges of convertibility, institutional capacity, and political consensus.

The central argument advanced is that, despite significant obstacles, the ECO has the potential to recalibrate aid dependencies and strengthen intra-regional cooperation, provided that robust monetary institutions and shared political commitments are established. By linking regional monetary reform to global debates on the future of aid, the paper contributes to critical reflections on how emerging forms of agency in the Global South are reshaping development in an era of systemic uncertainty.

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The study of 86 countries (2000–2023) shows that in developed economies higher income inequality reduces AI scientific production, while in developing ones it increases it. Additionally, in developing countries, in the short term, higher scientific output tends to raise income inequality.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) scientific production and income inequality in a sample of eighty-six countries from 2000 to 2023. We estimate a PVAR model using the System-GMM approach and analyze the Impulse Response Functions (IRFs). Our results suggest that, in developed countries, a higher concentration of income is associated with a decline in AI scientific production. Meanwhile, in developing countries, the relationship is the opposite: greater income concentration is linked to higher AI scientific output. We also find that, in developing economies, in short-term, higher scientific production tends to be associated with higher income concentration.

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As Nigeria balances Belt and Road with traditional aid, does multipolar competition expand sovereignty or simply replace old conditionalities with new dependencies?

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As traditional Western development architecture fractures, African states face both unprecedented opportunities and complex dilemmas in accessing development finance. This paper examines Nigeria's strategic positioning within emerging South-South cooperation frameworks, particularly Chinese development financing through the Belt and Road Initiative, while maintaining relationships with traditional donors. Drawing on recent infrastructure projects and policy negotiations, I analyze how Nigeria exercises agency in navigating competing donor interests, leveraging geopolitical competition to negotiate more favorable terms while confronting new forms of conditionality.

The paper interrogates whether this multipolar moment enables more equitable power relations or simply reproduces colonial hierarchies under new guises. While China's "non-interference" rhetoric contrasts with Western governance conditionalities, emerging dependencies around debt sustainability, technology transfer, and strategic assets suggest that sovereignty struggles persist in different forms. I examine how development assistance becomes weaponized in great power competition, with Nigeria positioned as contested terrain between declining Western influence and rising Chinese economic presence.

Through analyzing Nigeria's engagement with African Development Bank initiatives, Chinese infrastructure loans, and responses to Western aid reductions, I trace how recipient countries develop sophisticated strategies of forum shopping, playing donors against each other, and selectively appropriating development models. Yet I also explore the limitations of this agency within structural constraints of global capitalism and unequal technological capabilities.

The paper contributes decolonial critiques of both Western multilateral institutions and emerging South-South frameworks, questioning whether geographic origin of capital fundamentally transforms power relations or whether extractive logics persist regardless of financier identity.

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Muslim fishing communities in Malabar, Kerala, occupy a “new South” within a celebrated Southern development model, facing coastal precarity and exclusion while enacting everyday forms of agency and alternative development futures.

Paper long abstract

Kerala is celebrated as a Southern “model” of human development, yet Muslim fishing communities in the Malabar region remain on the margins of this success story. This paper examines how Puslan fishers in the hamlets of Parappanangadi and Tanur experience and interpret development, poverty and precarity within the wider Kerala model. Doing ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and interviews with fishers, women, youth and local representatives, the paper traces how mechanisation, harbour projects, trawling bans and deep-sea regulations have shifted control over marine resources away from artisanal fishers while intensifying livelihood insecurity and debt. It analyses how landlessness, communal stigma and bureaucratic procedures restrict access to welfare schemes, housing programmes and initiatives such as Kudumbashree and coastal development projects, producing a sense of being “inside the state but outside development”. At the same time, the paper explores community responses through religious networks, informal credit, migration, local associations and struggles over schooling, which together constitute fragile yet meaningful forms of agency and moral economy. The argument is that Malabar’s Muslim fishers embody a “new South” within the Indian South, created through layered relations of power that link coastal security, fisheries governance and subnational inequality. Re-reading the Kerala model from these coastal margins, the paper contributes to debates on decolonising development, subnational peripheries and the uncertain futures of coastal livelihoods in global development.

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This article examines the distinctive peacebuilding practices of China and Japan in Timor-Leste and the Philippines. Timor-Leste’s path to self-determination from Indonesia, culminating in independence in 2002, supported by seven United Nations missions, and the formation of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (Philippines) following the signing of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro serve as the two case studies. The article explores facets of peacebuilding not covered by the broader peacebuilding literature on the Philippines and Timor-Leste by comparing and contrasting the peacebuilding efforts of China and Japan. The article argues that Japan consistently applies uniform peacebuilding practices in the Philippines and Timor-Leste, while being more embedded in the former. In contrast, China engages in peacebuilding practices when windows of opportunity emerge. By analysing and providing a comprehensive understanding of alternative peacebuilding dynamics in Southeast Asia, based on extensive fieldwork involving four rounds of visits and over 100 interviews in Dili, Manila and Cotabato City, the article contributes to the burgeoning literature on non-Western peacebuilding and the changing global order of peacebuilding.