Regional Governance of the South-South cooperation in Latin America

Abstract

The South-South cooperation (SSC) dates back to the fifties, and since then it has evolved as a socially constructed idea by developing countries around a collective identity, the main principles on which it has been formed being horizontality, solidarity, reciprocity and independence. The ideological structure that has shaped it has been influenced by ideas and facts that are interrelated from different narratives. Norms and institutions have been the result of transformations in the international development cooperation architecture, especially after the end of the Cold War.

As a political instrument, the SSC has gained greater scope for consultation and negotiation throughout the 21st century. From the discourse, it has been consolidated as a complement to North-South cooperation, in its practice is an instrument for the exchange of ideas, policies and experiences between developing countries that have, or think they have, related political, historical and socioeconomic characteristics.

Norms, identities and interests are key concepts in the process of the SSC ideas construction. Therefore, the social constructivism of policy diffusion is the approach used for this analysis.  It allows for asking questions and understanding world politics and its social structure, as well as the possibility of change in international relations, especially the place of the Southern countries.

The main propose of this article is to understand the process of the regional governance formation process of the SSC in Latin America during the XXI century, analyzing the role of the Iberoamerican General Secretariat as an international organization that has allowed the political diffusion of ideas and practices between the countries of the region. As a vehicle for the political diffusion of ideas, practices and experiences among the countries of the region, this organization represents a step forward for the construction of a global SSC.

To analyze it from the SSC ideational structures, the methodology used is a descriptive and interpretive analysis, for which a comprehensive review of the constructivist literatures is made to give shape to the theoretical and conceptual framework on the SSC study. Regarding the historical and conceptual approach to SSC, the most cited academic texts were mainly reviewed, as well as the official sources of the countries indicated in the third part and the annual reports of the Ibero-american General Secretariat.

For constructivist scholars, the agent-structure problem raised by Wendt (1987) continues to be an object of investigative interest and also of division, and its study agenda extends to the understanding of various social phenomena, like the SSC case. In the field of international relations, the SSC has been studied to understand it from two perspectives: on the one hand, from the structure, to understand the changes in the distribution of power within international development cooperation, and on the other hand, from the agent (state), which is the focus of this article, to observe the rise of the emerging powers and their behavior in international politics.

The SSC, beyond being a technical instrument for the exchange of good practices, is also a field of growing academic and research interest, as reflected by the development of the text with the bibliographic sources used for the analysis. Most of the elements that are included around the analysis are part of the constructivist research agenda, such as organizational structures, narratives, ideas, and even the way in which facts and ideas interrelate to shape the institution of the SCC, as well as the formation of identities and the action and behavior of the states.

This article is developed in three sections. The first one, is a theoretical and conceptual review of social constructivism from the perspective of the transnational diffusion of ideas, policies and norms, something that has not been studied enough in the international relations agenda.  This is structured as a fundamental guideline for the analytical research. To review the concept of diffusion, first the definition given by Dolowitz and Marsh (2002) of policy transfer is analyzed, a concept that is borrowed from political science, as well as the mechanisms for its diffusion (emulation, coercion, learning and competition), which is subsequently extended to the field of international relations as policy diffusion based on the analysis of Marsh and Sharman (2009).

The second part of the article describes the historical evolution of the SSC from its ideational structures. Its purpose is to understand how ideas and facts influence each other and strengthen relations between states via cooperation. Finally, the third part analyzes the process of the national appropriation of SSC in Latin America based on political diffusion through mechanisms such as emulation and learning.

From this approach, it is understood that the formation of organizational structures has also been a strength of the regional governance process, where the Latin America countries have used the institutionalization created by the Ibero-American General Secretariat for the systematization of CSS practices. In Latin America, the SSC is consolidated as a tool of regional governance (Ayllón, 2016), because through it, norms have been gradually built that facilitate the exchange of ideas, experiences, public policy development strategies and knowledge that spreads to other geographic regions like a norm cascade (Finnemore, Sikkink, 1998).

Governance is a transversal concept within the analysis, this is understood from the classic definition of the Global Governance Commission (1995) that indicates that it is the sum of many ways in which individuals and institutions, public and private, manage common affairs. For the case that is analyzed on the regional governance of the SSC in Latin America, it is understood as the set of narratives, practices and low principles that integrate different agents around common interests.

Inside the new architecture of development cooperation, the political and analytical notion of governance is fundamental. States are no longer capable of solving problems on their own (Karns, Mingst and Stiles, 2015), and moreover require the cooperation of others and the coordination of interests based on the perception of common problems.  This serves to understand the regional governance process in Latin America, the SSC being an instrument for its formulation and management.

Finally, it is concluded that the SSC in Latin America has advanced in the consolidation of technical factors, of how to define and execute it, as same as political factors of how to conceive and guide it based on the construction of a narrative that has been shaped around some common interests and principles. However, the SSC is still a subjective conception of the countries of the South, in which domestic factors determine the dynamism of the diffusion process, as well as their instrumentalization from the political sphere.