The chapters in this volume have all addressed the challenges of contested cooperation in moving towards collaboration in ways that contribute to implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They focus on the evolving and conflicting normative views on development cooperation, on the roles of specific and important stakeholders, on technical issues involved in that agenda, and on the needs and challenges of institution-shifting and of newly created platforms. In the process, the handbook also takes up Agenda 2063 with its seven aspirations that Africa wants to achieve, highlighted in the chapter by Sidiropoulos, and the Paris Agreement, noted in chapters by Chan, Iacobuta, and Haegele as well as Weigel and Demissie. Both were incidentally adopted in 2015.
The handbook sets out to answer the question of how different narratives and norms in development cooperation can be reconciled towards achieving the 2030 Agenda. We propose a three-step approach for reflecting on this guiding question. First, we provide a more detailed overview of the narratives and norms shaping distinct approaches in the realm of policy for development cooperation. Second, we explore persisting and new institutional sites of contestations. Third, we also explore how international governance structures can better address contestations and enhance collaboration and cooperation.
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By mapping the evolving and increasingly complex multi-stakeholder landscape of development cooperation actors, the chapters in this volume contribute to a deeper knowledge of the various norms and narratives guiding the practices in the field of development cooperation. Furthermore, the chapters shed light on what we called “persisting and new sites of contested cooperation, particularly in the areas of setting narratives and norms, institutional architecture and international governance structures”. These sites include the negotiation processes among states and non-state actors within international and multilateral organisations, multi-stakeholder partnerships, bilateral and multilateral cooperation, and other development cooperation-related platforms. As an example of this global landscape of contested cooperation, in his chapter, Swiss describes how the globalisation of aid unfolds as a cyclical dynamic of the coming and going of vogues of different aid priorities.
Notably, the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) framework only offers little guidance on how these different actors and platforms can coordinate their contributions towards achieving the 2030 Agenda. In addition, the consensus underlying the SDGs is permanently contested by changing political dynamics, including the rise of nationalist policies and a decreasing readiness for global collective action. Against this background, several chapters explore how existing global governance structures may be further improved for dealing with contestations and avoiding gridlock; these include the chapters of Chan, Iacobuta, and Haegele; Mello e Souza; Li and Qi; Engberg-Pedersen and Fejerskov; Kloke-Lesch; and Weigel and Demissie. The two critical categories for these examples are actors voluntarily taking on greater responsibilities for international cooperation and actors piloting new forms of cooperation under the SDG framework.
Several examples from the chapters illustrate these points. The financing of Sustainable Development, as defined in the 2030 Agenda, is a key concern that has been taken up across this volume by different authors. This issue assumes special significance in this handbook because the 2030 Agenda and its 17 SDGs are far more ambitious than the Millennium Development Goals, and so far, the expected financing mechanisms have not been able to deliver what was expected. Very few donor countries provide the 0.7 per cent of gross national income to finance official development assistance (ODA), including debt relief. Although efforts are required to continue to press for the 0.7 per cent of gross national income commitment, it is important to supplement efforts for a large quanta of resource mobilisation for the timely achievement of the SDGs. In this regard, the concept of Total Official Support for Sustainable Development is aimed at complementing ODA and is addressed in this volume. Various chapters acknowledge the growing role that emerging economies are playing in supporting multilateralism, among other ways by promoting two new multilateral institutions, viz. the New Development Bank (NDB) (popularly known as the “BRICS bank”) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); this is discussed at length in the chapters by Paulo; Seifert; and Zaytsev.
Next, several chapters analyse how development cooperation actors have taken on greater responsibilities in promoting the 2030 Agenda across different regions. Janus and Tang, for example, illustrate how China promoted the 2030 Agenda during its G20 presidency and enhanced national development commitments. In addition to these examples, there are four cross-cutting contributions of this handbook that emerge from the chapters and represent key findings on the evolution of the policy field of development cooperation: (1) the primacy of the SDGs, (2) new theoretical frameworks, (3) contestations and cooperation, and (4) going beyond contestations.
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33.1 Primacy of the SDGs
Achieving development goals has been, both historically and theoretically, a complex and elusive task. In the context of globalisation, the imperative of providing global public goods and addressing the increasing cross-border effects of domestic policies render international development cooperation indispensable. The SDGs cannot be successfully achieved in the absence of some sort of cross-border cooperation, as discussed in the introduction of this volume as well as throughout several subsequent chapters.
As they emerge, two profound and relatively recent developments in world politics can be expected to make international collaboration in the ambit of the 2030 Agenda more challenging: first, significant shifts in the world distribution of power, marked by the emergence of multipolarity and the increasing role of rising powers such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS)—especially China; second, and related, increasing institutional fragmentation that is caused by shifts in existing institutions and the creation of new institutions. Fragmentation trends go well beyond development cooperation topics (Klingebiel et al. 2016). This has been visible, for example, in the emerging structure on global environmental governance over the last few decades (Zelli and van Asselt 2013). Such fragmentation generates, in turn, greater challenges for policy coordination, coherence, and efficiency on all levels. Globally, it leads to a proliferation of institutions and platforms.
Simple coordination problems are usually easier to solve than those that involve distributional issues or normative contestation, which often refer to the very notion of development itself. More generally, cross-border cooperation can assume different degrees of stakeholder involvement and commitment, which largely depend on the different kinds of collective action problems to be addressed.
Burden-sharing and joint risk-taking are characteristics of deeper forms of cooperation that we call collaboration. We found indications that the SDG framework has a much greater chance of succeeding if multiple actors are engaged in related processes, especially when including non-state and subnational actors. Given the fact that the SDGs and climate governance are polycentric in nature, the chapter by Chan, Iacobuta, and Haegele focusses on three interlinkages, viz. sustainable and climate-resilient development, emerging polycentricity, and coordination tools. The polycentric structure holds the promise of more effective governance and, in a scenario in which contestations have multiplied, this may help even in the absence of hierarchy.
This may become possible with new modalities, which may include greater convergence of various modes of engagement. Fejerskov and Engberg-Pedersen, on the other hand, argue that the extent to which global norms diffuse as a recognisable, homogeneous understanding is crucial for their broader acceptability across countries and in their differing social milieus and contexts. They introduce a “situated approach to global norms” to explain why the SDGs have not uniformised development discussions around the world yet.
The challenge of collaboration can be summarised as one of reconciling the need for inclusive and legitimate norms and institutions with efficiency, as argued by Mello e Souza, as notably a development cooperation regime becomes necessary from a systemic perspective. The chapter uses models of stakeholder participation in governance institutions to understand the exiting of Brazil, India, and China from the attempted global multi-stakeholder regime of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation (GPEDC).
This problem is compounded by the absence of any mechanism for prioritising the SDGs, which are numerous and arguably comprise all issues that relate to development, broadly conceived. As a result, the 2030 Agenda risks not bringing about significant change, but rather serving to legitimise policies that national governments planned to adopt regardless of the SDGs, but which can be presented as a response to the SDGs.
On a global level, Mawdsley, in her chapter, warns that the SDGs cannot resolve the existing contradictions between economies, societies, and environments that persist under the hegemony of finance capital. The regional connect at times is very strong when it comes to specific actors, as Zaytsev presents in his chapter on aid flows from Russia. As it has emerged, Russia’s priorities are mostly associated with facilitating the integration processes within the realm of the Commonwealth of Independent States, with a particular emphasis on the development of trade and economic cooperation (SDG 9).
Moreover, the fact that voluntary national reviews (VNRs) on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda at the United Nations (UN) High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development are the cornerstone of the follow-up and review framework of the 2030 Agenda further weakens this framework institutionally. However, the efforts to bring in accountability through measurement are a ray of hope. Collective efforts would be required to bring out the majority of indicators appearing in the “Tier III” category for precision in implementation gaps with no clear data sources or methodologies. In their chapter, Avendano, Jütting, and Kuhm argue that the alignment of global requirements with national priorities, new forms of inclusive cooperation, and a global financing facility for development data are possible solutions to overcome key challenges of the SDG indicator framework.
Schwachula in this volume has analysed German science policy for cooperation between Germany and the Global South. She suggests that, as we are moving forward with the SDGs, the possibilities for bilateral understanding and/or agreement between the Global North and South may be explored, bringing in different stakeholders, scales of cooperation, and themes for sustainable cooperation. The need for collective cooperation is captured in the chapter by Chakrabarti and Chaturvedi, who call for the creation of global public goods in order to achieve the SDGs.
33.2 Theoretical Frameworks
The volume addresses several theoretical frameworks across different chapters. Some of the key frameworks that are theoretically important and practically relevant are discussed below for facilitating a broader discussion on possible choices for parallel frameworks.
33.2.1 The Globalisation of Aid and Diffusion of Norms
Swiss applies sociological theories drawing on the World Society literature towards studying the globalisation of foreign aid at the macro- and micro-levels. At the macro-level, donors are influenced by the behaviour of other states, embedded in the global networks of international organisations, and aim to comply with global agendas such as the SDGs. At the micro-level, the literature on policy and norm translation describes how officials act to translate and adapt ideas into aid agencies. Pedersen and Fejerskov add to this analysis by arguing that diffusion of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs is not only challenging due to contemporary political circumstances, but also because of the fundamentally situated nature of how actors engage with global norms. They highlight that global norms are at the core of the SDGs and have an “inter-subjective nature”, which means that they are addressed, reproduced, or changed during social interactions and cannot be understood as existing outside such processes. Complementing these two theoretical perspectives on norms, Gulrajani and Calleja undertake an empirical mapping of aid allocation patterns of “Northern” donors, showing to what extents norms of “self-interest” and what they call “principled interest” in furthering the security, stability, and prosperity of the world prevail.
33.2.2 Discursive Institutionalism
Discursive institutionalism is a framework that helps to move away from a static perspective. Instead, the framework draws attention to the contexts in which agents think, speak, and act, for example, as part of an institution rather than being external to it. By considering this framework and the concept of coalition magnets, Janus and Tang analyse three areas of engagement, viz. the 2030 Agenda, mutual benefit, and development results. As per the discussions in other fora, this framework encourages “the North” to learn from “the South” and to adopt some of the best practices that are prevalent across “the South” for advancing the 2030 Agenda. These examples, however, largely focus on governmental actors, whereas the key success of South-South cooperation (SSC) is the multiplicity of actors engaged.
There is a need to evolve a framework that includes the considerations of non-state actors and encourages social mobilisation around some of the select features. While selecting coalition magnet ideas, one may also, of course, evolve frameworks that bring in specific endogenous variables from two contesting entities for better convergence as they move towards implementing a global agenda. For instance, mutual benefit is actually not a feature of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) approach of Official Development Assistance (ODA); putting that as a coalition magnet may not be relevant for many of their members.
Further work with these new approaches and contexts would certainly trigger a greater move towards more broadly acceptable approaches. In this volume, an initial effort in this direction is made by Ali in examining the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) using the South Africa SSC framework of the Network of Southern Think Tanks. Though the author recognises the data limitations, the lack of transparency, and the lack of competitive bidding in the Chinese financing of CPEC, on a broader level he notes that CPEC reflects the underlying principles of SSC comprising mutual respect and building local capacity.
Additionally, India’s theoretical framework of the Development Compact is also enumerated in the chapter by Chakrabarti and Chaturvedi, who call for better convergence between the SDGs and SSC. The chapter analyses some newer experiments in the institutionalisation of cooperation in providing global public goods that would facilitate the achievements of SDGs.
33.2.3 Orchestration, the Theory of Middle Powers, and the Four-C’s Model
The concept of orchestration, on the other hand, facilitates the integration of different approaches and considerations brought forward by state and non-state actors that are geared towards achieving a shared goal. Orchestrators (e.g. international organisations) define an agenda (such as the 2030 Agenda) that is shared by intermediaries (states) who engage with individual targets or target groups (e.g. actors from the private sector) to reach the shared goal. The chapter by Pérez-Pineda and Wehrmann shows that when engaging with individual targets or target groups at different (global or national) levels, it is important that intermediaries consider context-specific particularities and adapt their aims and strategies, respectively. Their investigation of the cases of the Alliance for Sustainability and the GPEDC further illustrates that the success of different types of actors that cooperate in multi-actor partnerships also depends on how orchestrators perform in their role.
Middle Power Theory (MPT) focusses on countries that have considerable influence, but not as much as super powers. The chapter by Baydag presents an MPT-based approach with the case studies of South Korea and Turkey in international development cooperation. Both have enhanced their visibility through their aid and development projects. MPT helps in understanding the role of middle powers in reducing possible conflicts between the established actors and the emerging actors. Middle powers help to bring possible convergences and can thus also be perceived as intermediaries.
Furthermore, Ordóñez-Llanos introduces the “Four-C’s model” as a concept that illuminates the relationships that emerge among different actors, and particularly how actors share power and contribute to vital partnerships. She applies this model to investigate the relationships between think tanks from the “Global South” with their “Northern” peers as well as with the broader international community. In her chapter, she classifies these relationships according to the strategies and goals that actors have in a given policy process, namely the “Four-C’s”: cooperation, confrontation, complementarity, or co-optation. From this classification, Ordóñez-Llanos concludes that the possibility for co-optation is the challenge of developing inclusive partnerships when there is an asymmetry of power.
33.3 Contestations and Cooperation
The rise of right-wing nationalism and populism worldwide poses challenges of its own to international development cooperation, and especially collaboration. Most notably, leaders in the United States, the UK, Russia, Turkey, Brazil, India, Israel, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Italy, the Philippines, and elsewhere have produced different outcomes in this regard. Some of them have rejected multilateralism, globalism, and international cooperation, whereas others have stood in favour of these approaches. However, there seems to be a greater degree of convergence when it comes to nationalism and domestic-growth-related approaches. In this context, the purposes of achieving the SDGs may not be free from several fragmentation-related challenges.
While the political pendulum does not swing back, governments unwilling to take on the burden of development finance are increasingly pointing to private-sector investments as a major source of such finance. Yet, relying on such a source requires developing strategies that enhance and regulate private-sector engagement by considering national heterogeneities and differences between the national and global levels, as demonstrated by Pérez-Pineda and Wehrmann in their chapter. This risk tends to be accentuated with the expansion of blended finance and all the challenges it poses for transparency and accountability, as shown in the chapter of Mawdsley. Instead of funding activities designed to fulfil the SDGs, there is a risk that the main role of ODA will be to leverage investment from business, venture capital, sovereign wealth funds, and other non-state sources.
Other private actors and stakeholders are also increasingly relevant in the efforts to achieve the SDGs by means of international development cooperation, by simultaneously contesting cooperation and engaging in cooperation. The role of Southern think tanks in providing the technical and specialised knowledge required to pursue the SDGs is examined by Ordóñez-Llanos. Banks investigate the role and contributions of development non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to development cooperation, pointing to the need for NGOs to maintain a radical stance rather than embrace the technical language and priorities of donors. Banks call for a transformative value-added role for development NGOs in meeting the SDGs by not only focussing on progress made towards targets and indicators, but also on modalities, the ways in which NGO operations are funded and executed, and whether this enables NGOs to be political as well as professional organisations, generating social and political change alongside their admirable impacts on the ground in service delivery.
The volume also reveals striking variations not just between South-South and North-South cooperation, but also between SSC itself, as discussed in the case studies provided in the chapters by Sidiropoulos, Baydag, Zaytsev, Pipa, and Mthembu. Furthermore, regional variations are also examined in the chapters by Mulakala and by Janus and Tang. Arguably, defining and clarifying the role of SSC in the 2030 Agenda requires building a minimally common narrative that will, in turn, require bridging these different approaches of the South.
Finally, there is variation in the very notions of development and development aid, assistance, and cooperation across time, as examined by Esteves and Klingebiel in their chapter. Several other chapters also look into specific sectors or modalities of international development cooperation and their relations with the SDG agenda, such as climate governance in Chan, Iacobuta, and Hägele as well as in Weigel and Demissie, and gender equality in Fejerskov and Engberg-Pedersen as well as in Hossain.
In addition to political and normative forms of contestation, there remain significant technical challenges to the achievement of the SDGs by means of international development cooperation. Three chapters illustrate that seemingly technical questions of measuring cooperation have deeper underlying conceptual dimensions of contested global governance. Mitchell looks into how we can measure the effort and quality of international development cooperation in his chapter and demonstrates the insufficient conceptualisation of measuring contributions to global public goods. The problems and possible solutions for the data demands of the SDG framework are examined by Avendano, Jütting, and Kuhm. Kloke-Lesch argues in favour of a functional approach to development cooperation that “would not start with the question whether countries, or people in countries, are needy, but rather whether there is a necessity or interest felt to impact on developments in countries, irrespective of whether they are listed as ‘developing’ or ‘developed’ countries”. Kloke-Lesch highlights that the “means of implementation”, as operationalised in the SDGs, still have a bias towards “North-South” cooperation and neglect the potential of a more universally oriented global development agenda.
There are several chapters in the handbook that refer to the GPEDC as a central example for “contested cooperation”. The GPEDC has piloted new forms of cooperation and collaboration, for instance, by transitioning to a multi-stakeholder partnership itself and by forming a platform for other multi-stakeholder initiatives. At the same time, several areas of contestation, especially due to their links to the OECD, persist. As Li and Qi begin their chapter with a quote saying that, “Due to their continued reluctance – or even suspicious attitude, which started right at the beginning of the [GPEDC] process – four of the five BRICS […] were absent from the second forum, as only Russia attended. This has had a big impact on the ‘global nature’ of the partnership”.
Against this context, several chapters attempt to analyse related contestations. The analysis by Bracho on the failure of the GPEDC to bring together OECD members and the main emerging powers under the same institutional framework shows this greater difficulty in overcoming burden-sharing deadlocks in international negotiations. In addition, Mello e Souza points to the failure in promoting the decisional participation of emerging powers in the GPEDC. In turn, Li and Qi illustrate how China has contested many of the norms contained in the GPEDC, both implicit and explicit.
However, there are now efforts by OECD-DAC members to follow the principles of SSC on a selective basis. Reference is to be made here to the SSC principle of mutual gain, which is receiving greater acceptance in the OECD sphere. Gulrajani and Calleja have rightly captured a statement by UK Prime Minister Theresa May in South Africa in 2018, on her first trip to the continent, when she said, “I am unashamed about the need to ensure that our aid programme works for the UK”. A net positive return to both donor and recipient is now a legitimate expectation and politically acceptable rationale for international aid provision.
Whether the GPEDC fills the gap through its monitoring framework—thus providing a significant contribution to the implementation of the SDGs—is the question that Bhattacharya, Gonsior, and Öhler respond to in this handbook. They suggest that this can be accomplished if UN VNRs bring in the GPEDC monitoring framework.
33.4 Going Beyond Contestations
Among the possible options for a way forward, the chapters by Zoccal and by Paulo examine triangular cooperation (TrC) as a modality that may reshape important aspects of the global architecture of development cooperation and make significant contributions to achieving the SDGs, also contributing to the promotion of greater normative convergence between South-South and North-South cooperation. Mulakala, in her chapter, observes that TrC is making a comeback, largely due to China’s and India’s increasing developmental impacts and influence in partner countries. Traditional donors may find TrC as a way to engage with—and possibly influence—Southern actors, and as a way to stay relevant in partner countries, whereas traditional aid is diminishing in value and impact. Paulo highlights that India’s emerging practice of TrC has unique characteristics and is making significant contributions towards achieving the SDGs.
The other instrument for moving beyond contestations is common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), placed on a high pedestal by the Busan process at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (2011). Bracho, in his chapter, analyses at length the constraints that are evident with the application of CBDR at a practical level. According to him, this may require a new approach and a new articulation. The chapter on CBDR even suggests that those countries most in need should be doing a better job of holding all providers accountable.
Furthermore, the authors in the volume also identify areas where the development cooperation of different countries and regions is coming together. Globalisation may have led to a convergence in development norms—at least with respect to the development cooperation offered by high-income donors—by means of isomorphic processes taking place between aid institutions, as noted by Swiss.
Several chapters across the handbook discuss the evolving global convergence of approaches in the realm of development cooperation for promoting the 2030 Agenda. As may be expected, reference to the GPEDC has once more come up as a possible choice. There are views in favour and against this platform about its ability to play a global role that is acceptable to all. In the context of the GPEDC, one important recommendation from the chapter by Li and Qi is that it should not categorise “the emerging powers” as one and the same, but should rather differentiate between them and discuss the issues separately with each in order to understand their different viewpoints on the GPEDC. This is important for the global narrative to go beyond the idea of contestations. The chapter also offers interesting theoretical insights on why the GPEDC should go beyond aid-based structures and get closer to what emerging countries are arguing for—a “development compact”, whereby modalities of engagement bring in coherence across trade and investment, apart from just aid-based transactions.
Next, several chapters highlight the prevailing importance of multilateral institutions. Pipa emphasises how the United States continues to promote collective governance and shared leadership, although the Trump administration has given rise to contestation and struggles over governance within multilateral structures. Whereas the United States represents an example of contestation in the form of “politicisation of international authorities” (also called regime-shifting or institution-shifting), there is also a second type of contestation in the form of “counter-institutionalisation” (also called regime-creation or institution-creation). Here, the creation of new institutions such as the AIIB or the NDB does not necessarily have to undermine multilateralism as such, but it can create new opportunities for collaboration, as explored in the chapter on SSC in addressing climate change by Weigel and Demissie.
One interesting formulation that has emerged in the handbook is the role that the middle powers may play in minimising the confrontations and enhancing convergence. However, an issue that has also emerged is that the middle-power concept requires further sharpening for easily identifying the possible countries that may be placed in this category and, with their divergence, a common pattern of middle-power behaviour can be identified.
Polycentric governance, as discussed in the handbook, may also help us move towards the 2030 Agenda and avoid contestations. The suggested tools eventually may help in understanding synergies and trade-offs. This may help in ensuring transparency about the types of actions and actors by using integrated assessment models and mapping interlinkages between goals.
Overall, our handbook applied contestation as a key concept throughout the chapters. Contested global governance (Cooper 2014; Zürn 2018) has become a main feature in international relations. Interestingly, the policy field of development cooperation is no exception and has demonstrated increased levels of contestation, despite prevailing cooperation norms. In this context, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a source for contestation and consensus at the same time. In development cooperation, the agenda is used extensively by actors and provides an overarching narrative, while also defending or scrutinising different narratives and norms. Exploring this duality of contested global governance in development cooperation further, therefore, remains key for future research.
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