 Hi, all. We'll get started. Welcome to tonight's seminar, which is on South to South Development Corporation 3.0, Changes in the Decade Ahead. Our speaker tonight is Emma Maudsley, who is a reader in the Geography Department at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of New Em College, and a director of the newly established Margaret and Steve Centre for Global Studies, located at New Em College. Her earlier work was focused on regional and environmental politics in India, but for the last decade or so she has researched South to South Development Corporation. Most recently, she has a growing interest in how the so-called traditional donors are responding to the challenges and opportunities opening up in turbulent development landscape. Our discussant tonight is Jonathan Goodhand, who is a professor in conflicts and development studies at the Department of Development Studies here at SOAS. He has worked extensively as a researcher and advisor in South and Central Asia for various NGOs, including DFID, ILO and UNDP. He was the principal investigator for a two-year ESRC-funded Borderlands Brokers and Peace Building project, and is now a major, and now has a new major research project funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund entitled Drugs and Disorder, Building Sustainable Peace Time Economies in the Aftermath of War, which focuses on Afghanistan, Colombia and Myanmar. So Emma will give a talk, followed by a response from Jonathan, and then we will open up the floor for questions. If you want to tweet at all, the hashtags are SOAS Dev Studies and ESRC. If you are struggling, then just wave and I will sit down and do the microphone. Okay, first of all, thank you very much to Visee. These mics are awesome. Okay. Oh, just a shout. To Visee, Jonathan and Patrick, I love being in SOAS. I used to work in Birkbeck, which I loved even a little bit more, but SOAS is my second favourite university ever. So I'm going to talk about South-South Development Corporation. I don't think I need to explain this in this audience, but just briefly a definition. I define it as a loose term, which refers to the exchange of resources, technology and knowledge, set within claims to shared colonial and post-colonial experiences and identities and anchored within a wider framework of promoting collective strength and the development of the global south. So I think some of the important things are it's not aid. Parts of it are aid or aid-like, and it serves many of the same purposes, but it is not aid. The second thing I would say about South-South Corporation is that its ethics, its geopolitics and its histories are different to those of North-South aid and development, and then it's also very obviously highly varied. So tonight I've kind of put a provocative hypothesis together, and one that needs you to knock it down a bit, because it's a big general set of claims, and inevitably and invariably that should mean that it is inaccurate to some degree. But I hope that the big overarching argument is also kind of productive for ways of thinking about in particular places and processes. And I start with something that I've often reflected on, which many of you will know, Julian Hart's schematic. She would be the first to say, of course, that this is a very simplifying schematic, in which she looked at different geopolitical and economic regimes, hegemonic development theories, and she's really sort of exploring the way the relationship between capital and the development industry and ideology. Of course, one of the things that this misses is a world of South-South cooperation that was taking place over this whole period, from Bandung to the Non-Line Movement, and then to articulations of a different economic theory around the demand for new international economic order. And loosely, as I've suggested in the definition, loosely framed by the idea of South-South cooperation. So when I sort of started working on this, this was sort of some of the stuff I was trying to unpick and look at. And then in more recent years, what that has become is, well, where are we now? And I started looking at what the so-called traditional donors, of course, India as a traditional donor, China as a traditional donor, but what we call the traditional donors, what does it mean for them? I'm still not sure I would say that I could identify a particular, I think we're still formally in the Dollar Wall Street regime, but it's changing. Financialization is deepening, but also there's interesting questions about, are we entering neo-McCanty-list regimes? A sort of more complex hybrid between economic nationalism and financialization. Instead of the Cold War, I think we're now, and the post-Cold War, we're looking at various geostrategic collaboration and competition with the rising powers and arguably people are starting to talk about a new Cold War. And then in terms of sort of hegemonic development thinking, here too I think we are seeing a significant shift away from the sort of, if you like, the post-Washington consensus, the MDG era, into a new hybrid development ideology around industrial policy, infrastructure, and hybrid finance. So this is the context then, perhaps not just for traditional donors, but also South-South. And what I want to do is suggest to look at something I called SSE 3.0. I dilemma the dilemma whether to call it this because it's just a bit wanky. And it's really, you're instantaneously boxing things, you're just trying to get a bit of attention with the title. It's really problematic, I'm not sure I should have, but I did. And I just want to be really clear, I am not suggesting this is the timeline of South-South cooperation. This is rather a particular timeline to illustrate a particular argument which I will talk through. So I've also just tried to, in a small way, indicate that I'm not suggesting these are neat chronological boxes. They move the dates overlap, the boxes, you know, hopefully you can see a porous. And this is where I hope you will find critiques. I'm going to pre-empt some of them perhaps by noting different countries have different trajectories. Cuba is different to China, is different to Vietnam, is different to Brazil and so on. The timeline, as I said, is specific to this analysis. It's not an attempt to fix the chronology. And we see some interesting trends that are prefigured. I'm going to talk about a more pragmatic framing. But China and Africa in the 1980s, I remember somebody describing it as a chill wind blue over China-Africa relations, as China started to assert a much more clear what's in it for us picture. So some of what I'm going to argue is characteristic of South-South 3.0 we see earlier and, of course, earlier things linger on. Okay, so what do I mean by 3.0? I'm going to come back to what I mean by 1.0, 2.0. I'd argue that right now, just like we look at significant changes in the DAP donors, South-South Corporation has been undergoing quite serious substantial shifts around stronger framing in geostrategic pragmatism. It's struggling to maintain claims to non-interference for better or for worse. And then it's harder to make an ideational distinction from Western partners. And I think some of the reason I kind of got onto this was I got a bit fed up with quite, with a lot of people sort of just repeating myths about South-South, whether it was a very positive and celebratory myth or whether it was very negative and hostile and critical myth. And yet over the last 10 years or so, so we're talking about broadly sort of 2010, 2015 onwards, there's been a remarkable change in South-South. There's been a huge expansion. And my question is, what does that expansion mean for the practices, the narratives, the relationships in South-South? And what this is about is looking at the success of South-South Corporation. And I argue that the success of South-South Corporation has led, has created a new set of challenges and opportunities. Okay, so what's 1.0? Broadly, if we say this runs from the sort of 1950s, the early origins of South-South Corporation amongst some partners, India, China and others, to about the 2000s. There's plenty of changes putting differentiation over this period. But one of the things that unites it or some of the things that unite it is that mostly it was quite small, although it punched above its weight symbolically in other ways. Mostly it was ignored by the mainstream development institutions. It was very strongly anchored in a language of third-worldest solidarity and variations of that. In the fraternal partnership of Maoist China, in the Bandung Conference, through the fight to establish Uttar through the novel line movement. And we all know this period also had tensions and contradictions and all the rest. But very broadly, this long sort of 50, 60 years, 50 years or so, shared these sorts of features. It was sort of fascinating to me. I sort of started learning development geography. I did a course in 1989. And none of this came up. And that didn't change, including when I started teaching it. It was only really around 2005 that I, as a critical development geographer, started thinking, how on is this thing called South-South Corporation? It is remarkable that it wasn't just the, you know, the orthodox, the hegemonic. Critical scholars, too, really substantially overlooked this alternative geography, if you like, alternative access of international development. So one of the things that I talked about in my early work, this table has come to haunt me. I mean, it serves me right. Any post-structuralist who looks at this, who's like, oh, my eyes, my eyes. You know, I said in the book that this is about the framing, the dominant framing, not the actual values and practices of Western donors and Western partners. I also said this is a horrible generalization. You know, we're putting Norway and the USA on one side. We're putting, you know, Indonesia and Cuba on the other. And so it's meant to be a helpful piece of work. And it's just followed me around ever since. And I've seen in a few places, you know, Maltese says that South-South donors express solidarity and, you know, it's like, no, it's horrible. So be careful of what you write, I think. Nonetheless, what it's meant to capture is that if you like an idealized version of a narrative framing from North-South and South-South, you take sort of the best version. There's charity, moral obligation, expertise, typically, you know, kind of Eurocentric and hierarchical and so on. In its idealized version, Western aid and development is based on sympathy for the distant other. And the virtue is located in suspended obligations, suspended reciprocity, that you don't give charity and say, well, what do I get back for it? And what kicked off some of this work for me was that development partners like China and India would be criticized for their inferior ethics of aid by talking about win-win and mutual benefit. And first of all, it was an aid. And second, there is a value, there is a morality to the idea of reciprocity and that morality lies in the idea of dignity and solidarity. So I contrasted these two. So I'm gonna come back to this in a little bit, but this was the dominant framing of South-South cooperation over most of this period. So then what changes? South-South 2.0 around the turn of the new millennium. I'm gonna argue that South-South 2.0 entered a new phase and it was a phase of remarkable expansion and consolidation, extremely successful. And in three registers, material, I'll explain what I mean, ontological and ideational. So the simplest one is materially. From broadly the 2000s onwards, almost every South-South partner, if we, I'll just ignore for a sec, some of the problems of calling Saudi Arabia and Turkey South, or indeed China arguably, but there was a very substantial increase in the material resources that they were allocating to whatever they called South-South cooperation, grants, technical assistance, loans, lines of credit, and so on. So you can see this is from 2005 to 2011 and that was a period of remarkable uplift. So from having gone to being quite a small allocation and largely invisible, Saudi South-South cooperation is a big time on the map. You can see it in any metric you like. So this is just Indian lines of credit using at-pics or purchasing power parity. And you can see to around 2009, 10, they really expand. You can choose other metrics. So for example, the number of people being offered scholarships and studentships and training courses, going to Cuba to learn how to become dentists and eye surgeons, going to India to learn about solar energy or accountancy. So you can, the numbers, for example, of India's ITEC program, which is the South-South training and partnership program have grown by 1000, so this is some of Samona's work. And then also you can look at big institutional sharks really changing the world of development finance. The AIIB is just one of the more prominent examples. So anyway, you care to cut the cake. What we can say that from the early 2000s, South-South cooperation is a broad sector increase, increases footprints. It was putting more money, more people. It had a higher visibility and presence, which I'll come to in a second. And it was really quite universal. So what do I mean by ontological? So if the first success is kind of material, if you like, countries that have become more powerful, richer, and more willing to engage in this particular formal strategy, the second thing that happened was that they, over the course of sort of that 10, 15 years or so, really consolidated their identity as legitimate and credible development partners. At the start of this process, they were often diminished and mocked or disregarded by the dominant development community. This is actually an example. I mean, even as late as 2010, exactly that process. So when the 2010 earthquake hit Haiti, the Guardian journalists noticed that Cuba, Brazil, Turkey, all the South Africa, all the southern partners simply didn't come into the media frame. Western media reporting wasn't interested or just couldn't even see the fact that it wasn't just Westerners rushing to save the Haitian patients. And he's got quite a long article about the way in which the media coverage and why the media coverage so underplayed the role of these other substantial partners. Many of you had good claims to be really quite, longer than fair weather friends. Now that's changed. And so why ontological and kind of riffing sort of idea of ontological security? That you know who you are and what you are. You have a centered identity. And what has changed is that over this time, is that if at the start of the new millennium, southern partners were either not noticed or relegated or diminished or criticized by 2015, this was just unsustainable. So, Rosen and Ivan talks about invited spaces. Come into the deck, come into the green room, come into the sort of the spaces where power really kind of takes place, both formal and often quite informal. And what is remarkable is first of the exclusion of recipients and southern partners initially. But that started to change. So the Busan conference in 2011, looks possible, doesn't it? The presence of the Chinese was critical. And there are Western diplomats who went to China more or less on bended knee to say, please come to this meeting. If you don't come to the meeting, it lacks all credibility. So this is a revolution in international affairs, international relations, in diplomacy. The fact that without China's presence, everyone knew the whole thing was kind of just empty because you need China at the table. You want China to sign up to the agreement at the end. We see profound shifts in global development governments. Well, I say profound. Robert Wade very rightly says, we have to be careful about this. That in fact, Bretton Woods institutions have been really quite good at appearing to make it more democratic and inclusive, but in fact, retaining most of the power. So I think Belgium still has more voting rights in the world back, no, the IMF than Brazil. But we do see more than superficial changes. So for example, the launch of something called the Global Partnership Steering Committee. For the first time in post-war global development governments, the leadership and the forum is represented by recipients, recipient donors and the so-called traditional donors. So by Nigeria, Indonesia, and the UK. This is revolutionary. So when I was doing some work on India and Kenya, the DAC donors had just created a body called KJAS, the Kenyan Joint Action Strategy. And it was just donors. They all got together once a month and that was almost an impossible task. And in Sweden, everyone talked to the United States and the United States didn't see why they should be there and all that kind of stuff. But it was envisaged entirely as a body where those talked to each other and then told the government what their position was. And what they were really responding to actually was the relative loss of power, because China was now on the scene in a big way. And so what KJAS folks wanted to do was bring China into KJAS. So they said, come and join us. This is really great. And the Chinese said, no, not until there's Kenyan government officials and this is run by the Kenyan government, we're not going to do it. So what we're seeing here is a significant shift in national and global development governments. Suddenly Rosalind Ivan's spaces are, you get seven partners being invited into those spaces and indeed seven partners decline it, decline spaces. So at the high level meeting of global partnership run by Mexico, I think it was 2014, the Chinese didn't come and this was a disaster. The Mexicans were truly embarrassed and the Brazilians were going to come and the Mexicans went to the Brazilians and said, please turn up, or else it's just gonna look so stupid. So the Brazilians said, well, we'll attend, but we are not a delegation. So that is real power when you say, oh, you're finally inviting me to your party. Thanks, but I've got better things to do. That's what some of the change. So this is ontological security, if you like, that the legitimacy and the credibility of seven partners is now very clear. So for example, that legitimacy and credibility, of course, turns into leverage. I'm probably all familiar with some of this stuff. This is the idea that President Kagami's talking about new friends who are criticized and that then creates a sort of a different geopolitical landscape within which development power resides. So the third of my changes, so we're looking at South-South 2.0, roughly 2000 to roughly 2015, and I've suggested that it's a period of success, one metric of success is material, one metric of success is ontological, and the third is ideational, that is whose ideology is respected, listened, or even leads. So back in 2005, we get Robert Zoey, who at that point was the Secretary of State, who said, there's little pre-echoes of Trump here, China is big, well done. China is big, it is growing, and it will influence the world. How will China use its influence? To answer that question, we need to urge China to become a responsible world power, a responsible stakeholder in the system. Now, I just want to note here that Robert Zoey was one of the original signatories to the project of the New American Century, which was the body that basically advocated the bombing of Iraq, the second any opportunity came along. So this guy knows nothing about what it is to inhabit, to be a responsible stakeholder in international relations. Nonetheless, he felt it comfort upon himself to lecture China about what it should and shouldn't be doing. I mean, I'm sure you know, some comments by Hillary Clinton and others. Now, I'm not an uncriscule advocate of China. I think there are indeed concerns to be had about parts of China's influence. I'm interested in the discourse of where China sits, particularly in, and others, of course, in its ideational approach to development. Now, we see something very different, and a paper I published earlier this year is called The Southernization of Development. And I argue that what we are seeing amongst the Western donors is that back in 2005, Robert Zoey and the OECD DAF and a lot of bilateral donors saw it as their job to socialize the rising powers to become proper donors, to bring them in to teach them how to do development properly. I would say that in the intervening period, if you very problematically took the north here and the south here, what the expectation was was that the south would learn how to become like the north. What's happened is there's a bit more convergence, but the north, in some ways, looks more like the south than the south looks like the north. So what we see in across the DAF community, including like-minded donors, including Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, not just the USA, not just the UK, not just Australia, the shift in priority and emphasis from foreign aid to blended finance, which is really good if you're in the business of finance, from poverty reduction to growth, so the pendulum has swung back away from the MDG, with resented economic growth as the primary goal of development. The rising rise, as it were, of infrastructure. And now we have Penny Mordent talking about win-win and the growing respectability. It's always been about national interest. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on what you do with it. But now it's an open discourse. It's completely out there. You know, this is win-win. Penny Mordent sounds more like President Xi when she says that, rather than like, let's say, Claire... Short, thank you. So, and then we see the stronger and deeper validation of various forms of the state serving capital through hybrid tools like PPPs, and that the state is kind of helping reorganize capital, not through the Washington consensus, not just saying, we'll deregulate, you thrive. Now you have much more kind of active state intervention through, if you like, an overseas industrial policy. So in this ideational realm, the what is, how do we theorize and practice development? I mean, I would say, adrift towards the South rather than away from it. So the South has not had to, as it's grown at South-South cooperation, it hasn't had to fit in to the post-Washington consensus. It hasn't, it hasn't, of course, so there's plenty of evidence that the South is an ardent advocate of nealable marketplaces in some contexts. But ideationally, it hasn't been co-opted or coerced into the sort of, as it were, into the hegemonic western-led community. This is a fabulous example of this. Justine Greening, who was Secretary of State for International Development in the UK in 2014, gave her international keynote speech from the floor of the London Stock Exchange, that well-known champion of international development. And this is the new world. And of course, the reason is China. And then Brazil and South Africa and India and others. This is because many of the Northern partners felt that they were falling behind, watching the success of China, Japan, Korea and others as they invested and so on. Okay, so that's South-South 2.0 and then, just a note if you like on some of the policy and academic evolution. In 2005 when I started this work around 2005 there was basically a general lack of awareness. It's not unexpected. To the extent that people were working on it, it was utterly dominated by China and Africa, which in the UK, in the west, are two places that have a lot of symbolic resonance and not always terribly accurate or helpful ones. There was certainly ideological hostility and often quite parochial theoretical tools, insistence that we had to understand Chinese aid in Africa or Indian aid in Sri Lanka, and it's not aid. So our theoretical tools, our theoretical models were imperfect for the task. Now, these days we've seen much greater exposure of visibility, lots of research including some of you here, I hope and doing the hard work, the hard yards of real research on the ground working out how things are. Of course, much stronger voices from the south. More diversification. We're looking at Korea, we're looking at Turkey, we're looking at Mexico and others. More sophisticated theory, I think, and very importantly, greater partner country experience and agency. Okay, so I've argued that South South has experienced this period of success and it is in the seeds of its own success that I think it is now confronting a series of challenges. So you can tell I was a bit unsure about the generalisation I'm proposing here. This is a very generalised argument but I think it has value in that regard, at least. So I think, first of all, there's context and that's some of the slow down in global growth. Second, that the expansion has outstripped institutional and legal anchoring and I'll provide some examples for these. The greater visibility, simply growing and being present has brought greater scrutiny and the fact that the inherent challenges and contradictions of this thing we call development have become more apparent and in some cases for better and for worse, partner countries are better at driving their agendas. Okay, so expansion not being anchored. I should really dilemma about which picture to choose of Bolsonaro because it's really easy to choose the scumiest picture possible and so what are the politics of that and who can know. So I chose a mid-ranking one. Anyway, so as we, as you will know President Lula was a he was an archetype of what I'm talking about. It wasn't just the Brazilian Development Corporation expanding businesses but also in reputation in high level diplomacy in charisma you know, this was a period of South-South cooperation that under Lula that really amplifies and exemplifies what I'm suggesting happened and then it's easy to blame as many people have done to say that Dilma wasn't interested in the national economy started to contract, it all got a much harder Temo really was not interested at all Bolsonaro is just going to like expo the whole thing and so that's how it is. And some of that is true of course Brazil does face a much harsher economic environment and there are the individual choices and proclivities of different leaders but one thing that my friend colleague Danilo Marcontes and I talked about was the fact that Lula under this period of expansion Lula did almost nothing to institutionally transform and to anchor Brazil's expanding South-South cooperation. So it's real flagship programs like Zero Hunger I mean he only had ever had one diplomat and he wasn't allowed to travel abroad that much. So in all sorts of, I mean Brazil is now a very particular example of retrenchment but we see it in India and China too and other donors that so developed partners continue to sort of grow or to kind of stay active that they are struggling now in various ways to make their expanded portfolio of activities that more to be run well. So for example in the case of, actually this is not the best thing, let me just do another one I'll come back to this. Really going forward. Let me come back to this in a minute. So another one is mentioned that development is harder than it looks. Development is about trade-offs it's about creative destruction it's about, we know from decades of work and critiquing international development that it's not straightforward and what has turned out as countries like China and India have become more programmatically involved make bigger claims or putting more resources and personnel into this thing called development partnership goes a bit wrong sometimes. So many Chinese development projects seem not to materialize or deliver the expected profits for either the Chinese or Parma countries and it appears now in 2013 that Chinese risk awareness is increasing regarding engagement in the African context politically and through the negative experiences. So the sort of the problem or the challenge at least is lies in its success. So I'll come back to some of the other points I mentioned later. I mentioned grace of scrutiny at home and abroad as South South has expanded so to have stories, experiences opposition and resistance in various contexts. So the Jeebe power project in one case or a attempt, I think a kind of a rather for-law attempt by Ethiopian and Indian land activists and in this case this is a picture from one of my undergraduate dissertation students of a Bangladeshi person who works for BRAC in Tanzania. His biggest problem was going into some of these places and going I'm not Indian. And this is very much odds with India's own kind of narrative of fraternity, of brotherhood of shared solidarity and so on. Of course it has a more difficult history not as difficult as the British but it's so that sort of sanitised version of high level diplomacy and nice long claims about brotherhood and so on. Of course don't always trickle down. So there's lots of examples of hostage-taking of perseverance of course is a very good example of the fact that development is development interventions, development claims are significantly more complex than I think perhaps some of the partners set off expecting. So what's the outcome of this? So what do we see ahead? And I'm suggesting that right now we're in the beginnings of a, if you like a sort of a third phase and one in which I think we will see three things at least. A stronger framing in geostrategic pragmatism. Now of course SASA has always been geostrategic, no question about that but the framing I think is going to retain some elements for sure. You're not going to abandon the language of solidarity, third worldism and all those good things. In fact I had a little exchange with Julia Bellagher of this parish and she argued that China is continuing to use that language even as its programs and engagement changes radically. And I partly agree with her and partly don't. So I think it just like the UK is now moving to this more strategic national interest win-win language but it still talks about altruism and doing good and all the rest. We still can't let go of that really strong cultural anchoring in the idea of altruism charity. But I think both the Chinese and the UK and the Indians and the Indonesian are moving towards this framing in pragmatism. I mentioned that I think it's going to be hard to maintain claims to non-interference a foundational principle of South-South and perhaps harder to look different from the West because of movement on all sides. So shifting the narrative as it returns to my deeply problematic simplification of narratives I think we're seeing a change. So for example in Indonesia Bajori argues that South-South technical corporations are increasingly being framed in terms of the direct benefits it brings to Indonesia. Respondents disclose this is pretty strong. SSTC now follows an Indonesia first policy designed to complement domestic development policies and the projects which had been framed in terms of solidarity win-win mutual development and so on are now scrutinized on a what's in it for us basis. In Brazil this was very strong and Dilma Rousseff she instructed patriota foreign secretary that she was interested in results-oriented diplomacy more concrete achievement less symbolism. In other words not Lula going around the world being everyone's guy and for Rousseff second term again the dominant tone was results-oriented results-oriented diplomacy. What was pro-Sovana bringing to Brazil? What was she bringing to Brazil? And that the valuable symbolism of diplomatic presence could not replace a diplomacy of results. So what we're seeing is a more strategic pragmatic framing of South-South that where some of perhaps the fancier the drawing on a really beautiful rhetoric that goes back to the 1950s, back to Bank Dunn is being just slightly shifted aside to make room for a more kind of hard-headed approach. And Aja and Ngombom said the ethical mooring of India's development partnership need not lie in lofty moral principles. In other words, Modi is not interested in being associated with the Nauruvian ideas of third world is solidarity. Instead and it's interesting because they argue then that this is about they sound very dark like here accountable, sustaining, legitimate and so on. But a sustainable ethical mooring, it's all really interested in the value basis. A sustainable ethical mooring can be derived from a pragmatic lens, delivering programs, value for many effective, accountable mechanisms. So I think where we're at actually in the current moment is a new sort of phase that is more converges and this comes to my point about the ideational converges is that we see the UK and the Netherlands and Norway and China and India and Indonesia starting to converge around a slightly hybrid narrative frame both around opportunity. Why is the UK in Ethiopia? Opportunity. And it says so. Ethiopia doesn't want to be simply framed as this poor nation. India certainly doesn't want to be. Talk about development. Partships trying to push away from the idea of hierarchies, recipes, donors. Expertise has been slightly differently reconfigured. Your expertise are expertise. We can go work in the third country together. So it's about collaborating partners and win-win a mutual benefit. So what this has implications for is one of the most foundational, important celebrated principles of Sassav Corporation which is non-interference in your partner country's political constitutional matters. And this is the quote I wanted to bring up earlier. As a result of some of its very problematic lines of credit and China as well has had a considerable exposure to risk, considerable bad debt India seems to be adopting a more interventionist, stringent and even perhaps conditions laden export credit process. So while not a lot of G-projects in the way the world bank does or demanding environmental or social assessments, they are certainly establishing war hands on regime. So as India, China, Brazil, Indonesia and others, Vietnam expand their investments in partner countries in Uganda, in Laos, in Colombia. They need to look after their investments and you can't look after your investment if your hands off, we're not interfering. And we see this in all sorts of ways. So in the FOCAC documents, the FOCAC press releases and strategic statements for China after the cooperation, it's remarkable now the extent to which China is talking about sorts of engagement with regulatory structures and legal structures and people led development because they're aware of some of the resistance and the kickback. Okay, we're nearly there. So here's the example of China, the change in China's financial diplomacy model Beijing is growing less tolerant of egregious risk with potential issues for poor countries that were able to tap on the China bank. China's had to lend to risky countries in the past because an official said they have the commodities we needed and because the Western Multilateral organizations dominated the rest of the world. But these days we need viable projects and a good return. We don't want to back losers. Like, we don't want to back losers was never part of the language of South-South. And part of the reason about this is because of things like Chinese domestic scrutiny. Then what, hang on a second, what are you doing? Where is this all this money going? And also the importance of economic viability for all sorts of reasons. So all of these mean that in lots of ways there's a very interesting sort of mobility and practices, principles, narrative framings that I think certainly the ideational distance between North and South is often being eroded. So for example there's a really nice paper by my colleague Devon Curtis looking at Chinese and Western engagement in the DRC and she basically says the West is not particularly interested in liberal peace building and China's not particularly is not just interested in both of them are more interested in stability than the things you would expect so that they are not just politically disinterested traders, in other words they're not knowledge theorists, not just doing South-South cooperation. So stability for both Western donors and Chinese interest has become the desired end in the DRC and in her paper she goes on to explain why she thinks that they've often doing this the wrong way. The way in which the West, the UN to secure stability in the DRC has been really problematic but what's happened is a convergence of interests around stability. It goes without saying I think that there's been more and more discussion about the ways in which most Southern partners are disengaged entirely from alternative development ideas. So whether it's Greater Central Hackeners, Buon Viviers, Pachalaman and so on and in fact in many ways Southern partners could be argued to have very like more powerful Northern partners and played development by naturalization and re-rise modernization theory and so on. So these are all debates to be had but what we see I think is the South and the North looking more like each other and this is reflected in places like the G20 and again a kind of a real a real transformation in the global governance about who is included and who speaks for whom. Okay? So to conclude I think that we could say that some of this talk came about because of this kind of slight irritation with some of the time lag that I suppose is inevitable to some extent in policy and academic work and it seemed to me that some of the analysis was based really on past 50 years or this a brilliant expansion phase of South South Corporation but within itself contain these seeds of change and I think that this current expansion of visibility for better or for worse, I'm not judging its impact to effects are exposing some of the limitations of the language and the practices, the relationships, the claims of South South 1.0 in the current world. So we see this stronger framing of this non-interference, the additional distinction and so on. So to finish I think we're seeing very exciting new geographies, really quite different new geographies of power and knowledge around the geographies of big D, little D development there's a whole other talk that we had there a reinvigoration interestingly of ground fiscal economy in some ways there's very interesting questions around the return of modernization principles, dependency neuro-cantuitism and that as we theorize and track and explore and research these things we need to do so knowingly the context of rapid expansion and now I think consolidation and in some cases retrenchment which brings different dynamics to the ones that came before and any rapid expansion is going to have consequences and I think it's incumbent on us to be at the forefront of that rather than sort of on the back foot to see what happens next. Great, thank you very much for that fascinating talk and now we'll hear from Jonathan. Thanks very much. Your hard act to follow Emma, thank you. That was a really interesting, exciting talk. I don't think I'm necessarily the right person to be discussing here. This is not, I'm not really looking at these issues in my research but I'm going to say a few words based on work I've been doing in two countries in particular Nepal and Sri Lanka because just hearing what Emma's been saying it does very much resonate with the kinds of dynamics and processes I can see in these two countries and the first thing to say is I really liked about how Emma presented this was to show the history behind this and to excavate the kind of long history of South-South relations and so-called non-traditional donors, new donors which are not new at all and you can see this particularly in Sri Lanka. There's an amnesia about the fact that China and India in particular have long, long kind of histories of collaboration both in Nepal and in Sri Lanka and talking to kind of leftists in Nepal they all talk about the NIRU and the independence movement and how it shaped Nepali Congress and those forms of collaboration go back a long way. China having a long history of engagement in Sri Lanka and the non-aligned movement so these long term continuities I think Emma's work shows and I think it's really important to keep those in mind but at the same time and one can see this really clearly in Sri Lanka over the last 10 years or so and there's been, I think the hegemonic shift is a nice way of kind of explaining this because it's about ideas and it's also about material resources in Sri Lanka there's a long history and in Nepal of political elites using international donors, international actors as a kind of scapegoat or as a way of mobilizing domestic national supports about NIR imperialism colonialism reappearing and this particularly happens at moments of existential crisis whether it's regime changes or in the case of Sri Lanka during wartime and in post-war transitions and so over time there's been a growing kind of question of international western actors in Sri Lanka and this coincided with a peace process that went wrong at the same time there's huge kind of shift in the balance of resources so a lot more resources coming in particularly from China and India from the kind of early to mid-19 2000s and so when I went back to Sri Lanka to do some work with a small group of western donors in 2012 this shift was very very stark in their eyes they said we used to be major donors in Sri Lanka and now it's middle England country it doesn't rely on western donors and here we are in rather shrill voices talking about human rights transitional justice civil society good governance corruption while this huge amount of resources coming in through infrastructure development from China and India and that kind of clearly shows that something very major has been going on which you can see in these places but it's very different from the kind of third world solidarity that Emma was talking about in the 1950s it's much more pragmatic now and one sign of this Mahindra Rajapaksa developed a kind of development plan after the war Mahindra Chintanaya and he mobilized a lot of resources from China and it was very much an economic nationalist kind of program after he lost power in 2015 the kind of the arch liberalizer Randall Rickerasinger came in but did he kind of get rid of Chinese money no he still so it's a very pragmatic kind of relation based on economic sets of interests and I suppose one thing it has done both I see in Nepal and in Sri Lanka it creates policy space for domestic elites to play off different donors and to to kind of be able to evade forms of conditionality so it does lead to a question of what do they do without policy space and Emma's talk kind of shows that while there are parts that we may be able to celebrate some of these things that these development efforts, these forms of intervention also have kind of create paradoxes and contradictions and a good example of this is Chinese investments in the southern port city of Hambantota in Sri Lanka huge kind of white elephants in terms of four lanes six lane highways, crooked grounds ports that have hardly any chips and so on and so you know these kinds of large inflows of resources are are while they may talk about economic growth they certainly have lots of problems linked to them in terms of their impacts on economic processes and political elites in the countries we're looking at so finally I think I wanted to touch on the Devon Curtis slide about stabilization and this convergence because it is something I see quite starkly now and as many of you will know that there is a lot of there's been a lot of literature on liberal peace building and post-war transitions and western aid with these transformative ambitions in post-war context to get to Denmark at the end of war and a growing realization of those transformative ambitions have perverse effects and so there's a growing interest now in so called a liberal peace building which we see in Sri Lanka we see in India, we see in Myanmar we see in the Philippines very kind of brutal forms of count insurgency and pacification linked to infrastructure developments and forms of connectivity and so on and you can see also western donors their ideas have shifted at the same time so if one looks at the work of stabilization in the UK government much more it's about now not about transformation of the governments but about elite bargains stabilization and I'm bringing about a reduction of order I think it's interesting how there does seem to have been some convergence going on on both sides of this debate so I've got a couple of questions to finish off with I think it does leave a question for me particularly in places that have been affected by war so the work I do in Afghanistan but also in Sri Lanka what happens to notions of humanitarianism and altruism and so on if aid is around useful countries very pragmatic sets of interests economically and so on what happens to humanitarian concerns in countries like Afghanistan or questions about transitional justice in Sri Lanka and so on I think this kind of brings an opportunity for more honest and less self-serving language on the parts of western donors but what are the downsides and costs as well of this more pragmatic hard headed approach second thing is I'm not a geographer but I'm interested in the geographical the spatial implications of this are we going to see a very variable geography now around intervention into useful countries and also within countries useful areas so you get forms of enclave development I'm particularly interested in the border regions of countries the margins what happens to those kind of marginal areas if you have a very state centric kind of approach which is about building alliances with political elites in order to extract resources and so on so the final thing is linked to people in this room a lot of you are I'm sure either come from aid or have ambitions to go into aid what is the future for people like Saras students and throwing on that bit maybe a bit kind of a left side it's coming out of the box I was thinking of David Moss's and App Thought's work on aid land and the performance theatrical dimensions of aid and the language and the discourses and the narratives in this kind of world of western aid I wonder what kind of narratives language and tropes are going to emerge through this process of convergence and it does seems what you're saying is I think it's quite interesting does that mean we're going to move away we should stop teaching participation and inclusivity and governance to our students it's about hard headed technical things that's what they need to be we don't want all these kind of software things we want really hard hard skills now so yeah but thank you I'm very very rich I'm going to go away and read the book now great thank you I do want to love to hear your comments and not just questions so maybe just very briefly touch on some of Jonathan's questions and thank you very quickly what happens to humanitarianism and altruism it's very much predicated for all actors on the idea of this is win-win this is good for everyone and I think there are shared interests in reducing conflict which can be positive to everyone I mean it is interesting that China the most recent Pocac report is full of discussion at least of people-centered development whether that's achieved or other things that's another question but this is if you like a Palanian response you can argue for the resistance so maybe we will see that sort of softening precisely because of the creative destruction but yeah there are definitely costs I mean I do think that there's sort of turns the idea of infrastructure and growth you know it's being collapsed back in as if it's equivalent to development we're surely the critical development community spent 50 years persuading everyone that development didn't equal GDP didn't equal growth and we seem to be right back there as if that's gay so that seems to be very problematic very quickly lots of policy space for elites and what's quite interesting then is what sort of politics that opens up between governments and populations and at the moment it's not looking really great where you do have a liberal governments who are empowered in multiple ways but I think it's different in different places of course what to study if you're a SAAS student and you want to work in development it's not all going to disappear overnight but I mean I would say that DFID for example is in a point of existential crisis you know successive and not everything that the Conservatives of Governments have wanted to do I think are you know entirely wrong I think what makes it hard is that the MDG era was something of an outlier in a way the development industry is kind of the elastic band is snapping back to where it was it looks more like the past but the last 15 to 20 years the MDGs, the Paris process this flourishing of the poverty reduction process and so on you could argue it's a bit of an outlier in the history of what international development has done and served a big world out there and it needs you and after this go and do an MBA and no I've been joking but I mean if you look at very very actively David Mitchell, Justine Greening started saying we need people with different sorts of skills and you could feel you could just hear all the people who had worked all their lives on nutrition and maternal well-being they could feel and going they could feel the chill wind on their necks because what he was saying was they need to finance people in they need people who understood finance and so I think there is we are seeing a skills shift in the formal development sector but that is I think quite problematic alright let's open it up to questions now so we have some microphones and please raise your hand if you have a question hello, oh hi, thank you for the talk I have two quick questions one is does the convergence and increasing hierarchy in south south render the south and north distinction irrelevant at some point and what importance do you see in regards to the BRICS and new development bank within south south aid yep, up there first of all thank you so much for coming and your presentation and your discussion it was really interesting I'm a PhD student from King's actually so I'm down the road my question is about the Zopakas so the zone of peace incorporation of South Atlantic which is one of the main focuses of my PhD research I look at Brazil and the Zopakas and diplomatic and defense relations in the South Atlantic itself so a lot of Brazil South America but also Brazil South Africa relations and as I'm sure as somebody who looks at Brazil I share your concern with Bolsonaro and what may happen especially in the future but my question is just really about what do you think about the move forward that the Zopakas may have especially now as we enter a kind of post cold war period because I'm finding that I've found a lot of literature and a lot of material in the cold war and the post cold war but now with the post post cold war and all the challenges and changes I mean there's a kind of dip I think and this is where it ties in with what you're saying with this overlap and maybe the kind of approaches are changing but I was just wondering if you could comment on that thank you any more, yeah over there Tony Allen from King's College London also so has Cameron was even better than I expected can I ask you a hard question I think it's a hard question you mentioned infrastructure as a theme going through all three phases something which interests me immensely is demography which is a difficult topic to be principled about but the big guy China has taken certainly 300 million people out of its population and 5 that's 5% of the global population 25% of its own and by the end of the century it could arguably have taken a billion people out if it had not changed its policy does demography ever get talked about because Africa which has figured a lot in what you've been talking about I understand could go from what it is now to 4.3 billion by which time it will have a bigger population than Asia which would be just 4.1 billion Africa has the chance not to overallocate its resources through demand but it looks as if it's going to go that way it is a net food importing continent at the moment and I thought it would have spare capacity at the end of the century but no it's by the end of the century it's still going to be a food importing in my view a food importing continent demography has changed in the three phases or not as a mission let's take one more over there thank you for the talk it was really interesting this is kind of half common half question but I just thought that everything you said related really well to what's going on in Asia right now is the one belt one road initiative and also the maritime road and then at the same time you said there was like a convergence between the way that the global south and the global north approaches like cooperation and development but then I would say there's also still some competition which we also see when China is trying to establish this whole infrastructure through the region south Asia and the Middle East and suddenly America launches this new Indo-Pacific concept to try and off balance China's influence and at the same time India's trying to juggle this non-alignment and trying to like incorporate all sorts of other regions and I think it'll be really interesting to see where it goes from here and who India will choose to cooperate with so if you have anything to say on that that would be great, thanks Thank you, well thanks very much I will do my best Convergence, I think north south there will always be we look different to the Netherlands Australia is different to New Zealand and in that regard I think that the sort of bundle of donors will see convergence distinctiveness in a whole variety of things so I doubt it would entirely collapse but I think that the value and the problem of imposing a north south binary is getting ever more problematic if that's for sure I don't know enough about Brazil I'm not a Brazil expert at all everything I know I got from supervising Danilo Marconas and his work and talking to Brazilian friends and colleagues so I'm very much a sort of other people's knowledge I couldn't honestly say although I think you should I don't know if this is other people who said this but you should trademark like post cold war if it's not a phrase already I do think what it does show and that was that annotation of Gillian Hart schematic at the beginning it's the geostrategic ground has shifted so we had the cold war which of course was very gated experience very differently very hot war in most parts of the world there we had the post cold war period and I think you're right to say I think we're in a new geostrategic period with interesting possibilities is it going to the worst cases we get that fanning of civil conflict that happens through so much the cold war possibly a slightly better outcome is you get this vying to pour money into places to create partnerships it's not necessarily I'm trying to not pull away from making this good or bad outcomes and not be normative about it but that new geostrategic this geostrategic era that is opening up could potentially lead to arguably a race to the top in the sense of drawing in partners through investment of course that's a really tricky argument who gets the investment if it's building massive unsustainable infrastructure what good is that and so on and then Tony the infrastructure I think I would say that while it was obviously a very substantial pillar of modernization modernization period it sort of as we all know went off the boil a bit under the Washington Washington consensus and post Washington consensus and there is an argument that the western donor community sort of took its eye off that ball and became so invested in ideas of governance and markets that they left many parts of the world distinctly under invested in place of the sort of material foundations of economic growth so now that's very clearly back as a major kind of everyone's talking about it then the the demography I mean absolutely it's China's role in poverty reduction is enormous it's interesting that China is very has always has at least for the last 15 years we don't have a China model for the rest of the world we did it this way we're happy to talk about it with you but we're not saying that the way we did it is your direction what I think is tricky for African demography and the huge predicted increase in population in young people is that of course it's happening at a time when China has captured China it's happening at a time when China is the manufacturer of the world China's demographic expansion and solution of poverty Africans will take place in a world in which China is almost impossible to compete with although it will have the spill over benefits as China invests in cheaper places like Tanzania, Uganda and elsewhere but Africa's demographic boom will take place just as the world of work has been profoundly transformed not just by China but by 3D printing by artificial intelligence and I think it is a perfect storm for Africa that through just desperate misfortune that boom of young people, of expectation of desire and of the ability to see what you want through your smartphone screen is going to take place at a time when the world will probably significantly lag and be working out a new relationship between livelihoods and living and work and then yes absolutely and very much this is competition and collaboration I think I stress some of the sort of convergence because I don't want to just fall straight into always competition always a problem, China's rise but yes it certainly is and of course it's in different places so it's not all collaborations, it's all cooperation so it's fascinating that so many countries refuse to follow the quite serious pressure being placed on them by the United States and invested in the AIIB and became board members including the UK and of course it's not all between North and South as you know India and China, one thing I found very interesting is the way in which India sort of boundary makes with China and so it says oh there's Chinese they sound just like Hillary Clinton, all they want is your resources, they're not people of the heart, they're not interested in your long term well being but we Indians we have a long history and you could just flip it, you could insert China and the West or whatever so there's this really interesting competition that is in the the kind of the diplomatic language realm as well as working on the ground I'm not sure I've answered your question but yeah plenty of competition in all of this too Let's take some more questions, yeah just one over there Thank you Emma, just a quick question on if you had any idea of responses to this convergence from the recipient partners because I thought you know the Southside Development Cooperation 2.0 there was a lot of talk of the Beijing consensus versus the Washington that's opening up all opportunities we can you know we can choose we don't have just one choice of partners or partners or a donors something is the the space shrinking and what are the responses from those who were the recipient or partners in this new scenario Just over there gentlemen, the great blobs Thank you very much I just wanted to turn to the point you talked about the civil society track and the ideological track as someone who's spent most of my life in civil society before after being a geographer and I think your characterization of that dialogue between those two tracks was very interesting in the earlier period it would be a great exaggeration but in a sense in civil society we kind of thought our job was to be fighting from the inside in the north to sort of back the new economic order and all these things and fair trade and it was all kind of we were way out there on the outside fighting but we knew where we were and then as you say in a sense the more recent phase where governments were endorsing that where you could argue that in a sense we kind of won for a bit it was an outlier but sort of looking at that and now looking forward what I'm interested in is the peace around south to south cooperation which I completely agree is something that's been very underplayed and including in civil society as well is sort of a reflection of a north-south dialogue so I suppose the interesting thing looking forward is if now the future is about trying to tackle global problems and how we organise and fight for that but not necessarily through the lens of south, what does that mean for how civil society now collaborates kind of I suppose globally because it was interesting and part of that was a period in which there was also an upsurge of sort of like global movements connecting and global civil society was the kind of whole phase where everyone was very interested in that which hasn't happened so I suppose my sort of question is looking forward how does the peace around the sort of track of south-south connect with I suppose fighting the case for global connection of any kind and those who want to kind of reject that whether the Bolsonaro or our government or Trump north or south if you like are on one side and then the kind of strangely maybe the Chinas and I don't know the Dutch and I don't know on another side I mean it's interesting to get your comments on that Any more questions? Thank you very much very interesting talk even big I was wondering if you could reflect a bit on China's history in being a country producing capital goods which at least in Asia have underpinned the development of Bangladesh and pumps small tractors rural capital goods and they started in the late 70s so we've had a cooperation if we start looking at trade in capital goods which were a win-win there weren't aid programs from China promoting any of that the same has happened in Vietnam also has an industry now which is in cooperation with China making engines, small engines China's now got an industry of growing small engines used in rural areas they have made it India but in fact the components are coming from China and that's so it's a I suppose my question is a cooperation between South-South countries which has been of mutual interest has been ticking over for 25, 30-odd years and possibly not observed or reflected on and some of the same thing I think is going on in Africa this is in equipment which is and I was wondering if you could comment on it's more a trade I'm trying to get my hand on in the context of your discussion thank you thank you very much very interesting talk I work in the development sector and I am following the debate at the OECD, the AC level on blended finance of BBPs the issue of South-South cooperation and how China and other players are being accepted in the table, something that was not present before so I have one comment and one reflection that I want to share with you to hear your comment because in my reading I think that you mentioned something about increased financialization and the new phase in which we are in in which countries are more interconnected in which we have players from the South that want to play a role at the global level so my reflection is what you think about having the global financial crisis from 2008 and the increased financialization as one of the main drivers I could say of these South-South cooperation 3.0 in which you have these conversions and in which you have commercial interest from both North and South countries very mixed with what was before a focus on development and now you have as a result of the global financial crisis these very keen interest of almost everyone to count as ODA the support that donors give to the private sector so their own companies are being center stage references in Busan to the role of the private sector financial capitalism literature that refers to that so how can we read these things along your lines of South-South cooperation 3.0 thank you very much so Simone actually I would be really interested to see what you think about it the recipients closing policy space in terms of they are different we like them because they are not the North they are both into the the rhetorical partnership I don't know if this convergence then kind of clouds makes it is this going to shrink the space the opportunities I wonder if this might happening I think you are right there was a lot of discussion about choice in a market place and therefore more policy space and I think there has been but underneath it all China, India, Brazil the big ones never really contested neoliberal globalization it wasn't in IEO they weren't actually making a they weren't advancing big ideological opposition to neoliberal globalization so in that sense the policy space is not quite that sort of alternative I think what we are seeing where some closures taking place is this growing concern to make this money to make these loans and grants work so whereas I think 10 years ago there was a site sort of throwing the money out the door in this kind of ebullient period of everything is going to change of global growth and the sense that these partnerships would produce all these things now I think post-global financial crisis with 10 years of experience India for example is becoming a lot cagier about its lines of credit fascinatingly not particularly making a big noise about it, it is working with the UK to try to get its lines of credit with East, Central, West Africa more robust and better set up so in that sense I think that is effectively a closing policy space it might not be a bad thing if that money was simply being kind of off short into whatever ministers Swiss bank account or whatever so that is not necessarily a bad thing I think you then have to look down case to case but I do think it is perhaps you could almost argue cheerful, optimistic or naivety of that sort of policy space argument might not quite be the same but I do think the hegemonic grip of the West on development theories, practices institutions is ruptured the West is still wildly powerful but I don't think it is the same world it was and that can only be a good thing civil society I am sure you can tell better than me about this it is really interesting what I should have said was a very state-state state-centered account of South-South cooperation the sort of the formal institution so I didn't talk about civil society which has a long transnational history including South-South but which has tended to be really drowned out in the last decade by big state growth and often quite repressed so the other side of this at the very same time as we are seeing this kind of southern states and solidarity they are turning round in places like India and really repressing repressing civil society that is very concerning as Jonathan pointed out about illiberal peace building and illiberal development this is very much woven into this how do we take it forward I mean I think in some ways there are real points of optimism or hope perhaps connect us in Brazil really doing some the hard labour not always successful but that long struggle to hold states and companies to account but it does feel a bit bleak a little bit but I think in some ways because it is so clearly transnational and not about nation states perhaps transnational activists in the north and south can slightly shed some of the never so you could ever shed history nor be attentive to on going power relations or to decoloniality and so on but perhaps there is an opportunity for more equality of partnership there and not recognising northern partners sit within south south or the fringes of south south partnerships too so that would be the optimistic version and then so I think you are right this is a long history of really often quite noble and impressive relationships of solidarity that really did benefit southern partners like the example of tractors and pumps in Bangladesh that was in the 1970s and I think some of the differences now that make it a bit more open to question first of all the scale so this has been the south south 2.0 the massive scale of the expansion and Ian Taylor is one person who has raised concerns about the re-indetting of partners so Sri Lanka would be a very good example and whereas in the 1970s the level was actually quite small so that even if China was exporting in a trade relationship pumps and tractors but Bangladesh wasn't going to become indebted to China but now possibly it will and then the second thing I would say that both Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and China are all embroiled in a world of transnational capitalism so although China has a distinctive political reason to drive poverty reduction more than most governments some governments can be rather less concerned about it and as the capital gets sucked up into the 1% in the 1970s for all their failings significant failings the kind of context was developmental states depending on where but now I think there's a different dynamic between states, citizens and capital that can sometimes work well Bangladesh in many ways is doing well but not always and then the financialization absolutely 100% I think a lot of where the northern donors is because of the financial crisis domestic pressure and the sense that China, India, Brazil are out competing them so hence the rewriting of the rules of ODA the rules of foreign aid were created basically as a gentleman's agreement between donors so that old colonial powers didn't use aid to foster unfair trade agreements and that was fine the six biggest economies in the world were all in Europe and America it didn't matter what China did if it was using export credits or India was distorted the market now it matters so what the West is trying to do is basically abandon the gentleman's agreement because all of a sudden they've got to get their hands dirty again and so all try to bring China and others into the club and China and others are saying no thanks there's a bit of both going on but so I think that that's the key driver of some of these changes are there any last questions no, alright then please join me in thanking the speakers for the wonderful talk so next week's talk is by Cedric Durand on Victitious Capital in the 21st century same time, same place I would like to invite all of you to join us in the scene