Brazilian Perspectives on Policy Transfer and South-South Cooperation

Abstract

Abstract This paper introduces the dossier entitled ‘Policy Transfer and South-South Cooperation’. Very often development cooperation programmes, particularly those labelled as part of South-South cooperation (SSC), use policy transfer as one of their key implementation tools. However, irrespective of cross-cutting dimensions and shared commonalities, both fields of practices have generated research traditions that have followed specific disciplinary (and sometimes interdisciplinary) trajectories which have seldom met. Policy transfer promoted by national and international, state and non-state agents of the Global South via development cooperation raises several questions that remain unexplored and overlooked by the scholarly literature. This dossier intends to promote a dialogue between these two fields, thus analysing how policy transfer through SSC may create new power relations, identities, world visions and practices. This introductory article presents a theoretical cartography and offers in the first section a brief literature review of both fields of research; in the second section it presents the historical background of SSC and Brazil’s changing roles in it; the third section outlines possible conversations between policy transfer and SSC; finally, in the concluding remarks we bring a few reflections about future research agendas.