Dan Banik and Emma Mawdsley discuss the modalities of South-South Cooperation (SSC), the role of state-owned enterprises and private sector actors, and how we ought to understand the performance of gift-giving by partners in the Global South under the SSC umbrella.
Welcome to the final episode of season 2. We’ve had some great guests this season and the show has attracted thousands of new listeners in large parts of the world. Thank you all for listening and for all the positive and most encouraging feedback that we have received this year.
Our guest this week is Emma Mawdsley, who is a reader in human geography at Newnham College and Director of the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies at the University of Cambridge. She recently received the Royal Geographical Society’s Busk Medal for her exceptional engagements with fieldwork, research and knowledge production about the Global South.
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Thank you and I wish you all an enjoyable summer.
(by Ingrid Ågren Høegh)
Theme music You are listening to In Pursuit of Development with Dan Banik.
Banik I'm a great fan of your work, Emma. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome.
Mawdsley Thank you very much, it's a real delight to be here.
Banik Emma, you've worked extensively on South-South Cooperation (SSC) and development policy over the years. What would you highlight as the characteristic features of South-South Cooperation, since it began, I believe, in the 1950s?
Mawdsley Sure, it won't come as a surprise to anyone if I start off by saying it's incredibly diverse. A little bit like, someone once described foreign aid as like a swiss army knife, I want to be careful about drawing an analogy between foreign aid and SSC, they are very different, of course, but the swiss army knife is a nice one. Just like other parts of foreign policy, there's a multiple set of activities and agendas. There's also a huge difference between Brazil taking part in huge projects in Mozambique or smaller projects on food or peacekeeping or infrastructure. It's all very different and of course it's very different between countries too. So, I think the diversity is the first thing that we should say. Then the second thing is that there are some uniting principles and I'm going to call them myths, not in myths as in untrue, but they are overarching ideas that are sometimes more honoured in the breach but nonetheless they are really important and they run really deep. And they have their origins in the anti-colonial struggles and in the newly independent countries who fought for greater say and greater autonomy in global politics, in a world that both politically and economically would be more just and democratic and through those ideas of those, often structurally weakly placed countries acting in solidarity, showing solidarity to each other and coming together, so those very important principles of respect for sovereignty, horizontality, of this being a mutually beneficial relationship, all of those are very important parts of SSC. And we can find plenty of things that demonstrate that they are also a bit fragile, and I would also say they are changing quite a lot. But historically, those are very important parts of the SSC principles.
Banik As I understand it, Emma, this SSC, this modality of SSC has evolved over the years, and I read in your work that in the last couple of decades, I think, there's been this rather successful expansion of SSC and we're talking about this assertion of this shared developing country identity, as you mentioned the donor-recipient relations, there's this focus on expertise and appropriate development, and as you also mentioned, mutual opportunity, but do you think that has changed in the last couple of decades, because I've read in your work that you've often characterised SSC as 1.0 and 2.0 and perhaps we are moving into a 3.0 phase. What has changed and what does SSC 3.0 promise in the near future?
Mawdsley Thanks, Dan. I'm a bit embarrassed about using those designations, I wavered backwards and forwards on that because it's so easily proved to be wrong, you know, and I say in the paper its just one way of slicing historical diversity, of experience and practice, so India's path is different from Brazil's and so on. And historically contingent, so India's relationship to Afghanistan is not the same as with Sri Lanka. I hope that anyone reading it will forgive me this sweeping generalisation. I never claim it's the timeline for SSC, but I think that one can nonetheless, as we struggle with the balance between the exact and detailed and specific and trying to draw out meaningful generalisations, I think that we can see some big and significant shifts in the narrative and conduct of SSC, and the way I frame that, I think its a result of the successful growth, and the growth materially, we can see a huge increase in investment and activities and educational places, you name your field and we can see a boom in SSC. It's also been incredibly successful ideationally. In the sense that if you go back to the early 2000s, I think the dialogue that was opening was intentionally and unintentionally trying to co-opt the Southern partners and quite a strong – surprise, surprise - arrogance among the so-called 'traditional' donors, that they knew how to do it and would show the others how to do it. And that's no longer the case. If anything, I think the West, the DAC donors, have been learning from Southern modalities and approaches. And Southern partners have grown in their clear identity as legitimate, effective actors in international development in a way that they were neglected not just by the mainstream establishment, but very interestingly I would say by a lot of critical scholars until the early 2000s, and myself included. How could I have not really clicked to Southern development partnerships before then? So that success has brought with it costs. We know that China is feeling very exposed, some of its loans in different parts of Africa, so too is India. There's risks, there's visibility that isn't always desirably visibility if you're being blamed for something and simply by engaging in development of whatever variety in a country, I think perhaps some of the early not optimistic or naive narratives of SSC have been shown to be much more complex, development is often a destructive as well as a creative process. People win and lose and it's not easy. And I think that's being brought home to some of the Southern partners. We can think about Brazil and PRO Savana, for example. So, I do think we're seeing shifts and they are also contextualised within the emerging geopolitics, especially around China and in the post-Financial Crisis and the evolving way in which the Western donors are increasingly embracing financialization, industrial policy and so on. And I think in SSC, very broadly, we see much more pragmatic language and much more cautious actually about some of the parts of Southern partnership. And a much more competitive language between some of the big players. We see in some places, of course, the retreat as well from more active Southern partnership engagement, Brazil would be an example of that. It's evolving and it always has, we've been here a little bit before in the 1980s but evolving in this current context or conjuncture of circumstances.
Banik That's fascinating, Emma, because there appears to be several interests involved. On the one hand, SSC is driven by a country's experience with colonialism, underdevelopment, some sort of a reaction against Western models, so here it is more about combatting an asymmetrical relationship that the global South has had historically with the dominant global North. On the other hand, there is the material approach, that there is this attempt by the global South, some of the major powers in the global South, at using SSC as a useful tool for improving the reputation of these emerging powers to get more support from other Southern partners, in the UN, or in other multilateral settings, to pursue broader economic agendas, all of that. But do you see sometimes a contradiction between the normative approach and the material approach? That maybe there has been more of a focus on a reputation seeking goal of late, that has somehow underlined the SSC narrative than the normative approach.
Mawdsley By normative in this case you mean the claim to mutual solidarity and benefit?
Banik That's correct, and this joint experience of fighting colonialism.
Mawdsley Yeah. So, I think now it's less, while those origins are very important it's also neo-colonialism, neo-imperialism, the world is still structured grotesquely unfairly and I think there's every reason to support the attempts by some countries to contest that structural inequality and we can see that in representation. Where the contradiction comes is in, there's very little sense that most Southern partners are really engaged with a more inclusive, or not democratic in a Western sense but an inclusive development so that they are sometimes buying into financial and modernist promises of liberation, which are partly true, we all know that one of the failures of the DAC donors was they moved away from infrastructure and economic growth, it seems sometimes the Southern partners are willing to sit within what is a very unequal world, in which states are not always the primary repository of those inequalities but capital vs. the poor. So, the primary contradiction for me is around the idea of justice between states and justice within states. And SSC is articulated in strong, credible, and important claim around justice between states and I think where it is much less good, and it's an inherent contradiction, not easily resolvable, but what do you do about justice within states? And it's not an easy question to ask, but I don't think they are leading, for the most part, a more inclusive development agenda. It varies, of course, it's not simplistic. But overall, that's my concern.
Banik Despite the claim that SSC is about redressing unequal relationships between the South and North, there may be in some cases a replication of certain practices that the South felt the North was undertaking before, so maybe you would have certain major powers like India, China, Brazil, duplicating, replicating similar exploitative practices in relation to this collaboration they have with other countries in the South. Is there a danger that this is happening?
Mawdsley Yeah, I think it's a concern. Where I'm worried is what I see is a language of the new Cold War, which is being amplified, prefiguratively created and the framing in particular of China as the enemy, when China is doing many, exactly what France and the UK and US do around the world. I mean, France's relationship with West Africa are jaw-droppingly colonial right now, at this very moment. And yet, it has the effrontery to criticise China. An enormous amount of debt held by countries in Africa is actually held by European institutions and banks and markets and yet China is the one that comes up for criticism. The West used the debt crisis in the 1980s to unleash the most appalling policies across many parts of the world, notably Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). I think the very first reaction is this staggering hypocrisy of many Western actors and commentators who self-righteous denunciations of countries which are using development funding and partnerships to pursue their own interests. You sometimes think, have I misunderstood this? That's not to say there aren’t concerns of course. And, as many people have pointed out, African agency and partner agency becomes very important but it's not a simple solution either because we are caught up in a world in which no individual country can do anything about transfer-less pricing. The way in which the city of London acts effectively to funnel or channel off enormous amounts of money from around the world to keep it hidden away from the tax man. I know I'm wondering slightly with this; I think the critique of SSC is subject to enormous amounts of prejudice and ignorance. That's not to say we shouldn't be carefully looking at some of the evidence and the detail, trying to talk and understand from different points of view, be critical and reflective about DAC-led development, Western development, but we need to do so on a scholarly basis, and that's not happening in the narratives around China and African debt at the moment. It's ideological, it's almost determined to pick a fight, and it's ultimately, sad to say, stupid, I think, that there are reasons to engage with China critically, more cooperatively and more competitively, but not around this, and at the moment I think we've got bad evidence and bad... I think Joe Biden is taking a very problematic line, for example.
Banik A very illustrative example of what you said Emma is what happened last week in Cornwall when the G7 met and there was this announcement of this major new initiative to support infrastructure building in the Global South and while a lot of my colleagues especially in Africa have been longing for that kind of commitment from the West, a lot of people have been saying 'don't criticise China, don't criticise emerging countries, show us some viable Western alternatives' while this is a good announcement, there was very little information on the specifics. So, that is one problem. There is this tendency of announcing major initiatives but not really following through, and secondly, another problematic aspect is that the perception that is created is that we're doing this from the West to combat China. So it's not because of solidarity with the Global South or because we really want to invest in infrastructure or win-win, we're doing it to combat China, and this I think is not a very useful way going forward, because a lot of countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, can see through this very easily that they're not interested in their development, but more because of geopolitics.
Mawdsley Absolutely, and I know that your close connections say in Malawi, talking with your friends and colleagues, I think if I'm allowed to swear on your podcast, I think the problem with countries, particularly the US and UK and perhaps France, they believe their own bullshit. I know many people in former DFID who are doing a good job. I'm very critical of aspects of aid and development, but they do, have learnt, are trying to hold some high standards and so on, but the overall picture is one in which the West is... I'm sitting in the UK... it's caught up in an old myth, I think in the UK we have this post-imperial hubris, lack of reflection, and there are lots of examples like you mentioned from Cornwall, this announcement of false money, which we know is actually really hard. Are we going to be spending 10 times more than a Chinese contractor to build a road or a railway? The Chinese are having a lot of fun right now, posting lots of pictures of appalling American infrastructure and various bits of news about how long it's taking us to build. Where we think we have either the finance or the expertise is a big question and at the same time this sense that the obvious subjects or super texts that it's against China, of course so many partner countries are insulted, and so they should be by this. I think what is sad for me, is if there was ever a moment when the world needed to collaborate, it's now. We are sitting in a pandemic knowing the way that climate change is going to come down on us, and it is coming down on us. And at the same time you have world leaders, and I include Xi Jinping among those, and Narendra Modi and Joe Biden, digging up this conflictual model and it just seems, wouldn't it be fantastic if we asked our partner countries in Africa what they wanted and needed and then say we've got some really experienced firms that can build those roads, say British expertise around engineering or other things, we could bring our respective skills together for what our partner countries wanted in a collaborative model, and in the context of the pandemic and climate change, and yet we are going in such a wrong direction and development is every more distorted, hardly for the first time, this is what development does, it gets sucked into the politics of the Cold War, so called War on Terror, and here we are again and the one thing we know is that none of those prioritise the needs of developing communities or countries or indeed the populations who are the taxpayers in say my own country, will not benefit I believe form this approach. It's disappointing to see that, of course I'm thrilled to see that we've gotten rid of Trump for now, but I'm so disappointed to see this cosying up of particularly Johnson and Biden around the new Cold War. I think it is a desperate mistake and the whole development infrastructure in the UK is suffering, as you know.
Banik One of the persistent complaints from my colleagues and many of the policy makers I interact with in the South is that the West has of late become very fond of these generous proclamations, promises, but not really following up on these promises, so you could promise 100 million dollars in emergency assistance and when you really get down to the nitty gritty, maybe one tenth was actually provided, so I think a lot of countries in the South are pretty accustomed to these grand declarations not really materialising. The other thing has to do with expertise, as you mentioned, I read a recent piece, a bit of this Chinese laughing at the West, because it turns out that there are very few Western companies that have the capacity and the experience and the skills to undertake these major infrastructure projects in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, so one analysis I read was that this is actually good for China because all of these Chinese companies will suddenly be bidding for Western contracts, so if the West was actually launching this, the G7, to combat the rise of China, it's going to have the opposite effect.
Mawdsley Yes, I mean China is already winning contracts from the World Bank and others, and underneath all of the posturing, it may be that there is a lot of cooperation, joint ventures, and we know that this has happened throughout. Different places and different actors. and it might be what China needs. We know that Chinese private investments in infrastructure in Africa is declining, for various reasons, so actually it could come as a shot in the arm if the G7 were able to mobilise the finance needed and to support Chinese companies building roads and railways. But again, I think critical thing is what if they turned properly to the partner countries and thought or were led by them in what they wanted and needed and thinking through a systems strategy, regional-based infrastructure and so on. There are all sorts of potentially positive payoffs here and I don't know whether the pragmatics of trade and other forms of commercial cooperation will trump the political rhetoric, but the political rhetoric seems to be getting very hot.
Banik You raise a very important point here, Emma, which really plagues development or has done in the last 5 decades, and that is the lack of consultation with those one is trying to assist, or talking with countries in the Global South, asking policymakers, asking citizens what they need, despite all the criticism of China, you could say that at least there is an attempt by Chinese policymakers, by the diplomatic community that China has in these countries, to actually ask governments what they need and this is what we can offer. Similarly, I am often surprised that the West fails consistently to learn from that experience of what China and others have done more successfully is to make others feel, so called recipient countries, feel important, to consult them, to ask them what they need. It appears to me that it is a very rushed effort whenever there are these high-level events, like G7, there is this summit to come up with something new, but one doesn’t do the homework, and the only reason, maybe I am generalising too much now, but it seems to me that the major reason why one even announces an ambitious strategy is to somehow give the impression that this group of countries called the G7, or whichever country making this announcement, that they are still important, they still have a say in global affairs. And so, maybe that explains this lack of consultation, but as you rightly say, if they had only asked people what they needed, perhaps these initiatives would not just be rhetoric but actually implementable in practice.
Mawdsley Yes, as you know, it is complicated, so there have been examples, if I recall right, the erstwhile DFID supported the Nepalese government in negotiating I think with India regarding some of its dam, hydropower development. And they were providing some technical assistance, and a lot of these projects are very complex, financially, legally, and it is sometimes an inequality in capacity to negotiate and to define what are one's own needs. Then there is this question of what is this thing called? There are conflicting needs and wants in those places, so it isn’t a clear singular sense of 'Kenya wants this', there are differences between regions, groups, pastoralists, farmers, small business owners and so on. I think that's not always inherently straight forward. And when China does a good job of talking about listening to its partners, I think that is, certainly there is a truth there, but at the same time, we also know there is some murky politics and murky relationships taking places, the colonial powers left extremely weakened political and authoritarian structures and then structural adjustment hollowed out states, so that sense of who we are asking isn't straight forward. I think it's complex when it gets to these Southern partnerships. What sovereignty means in this context. But what I absolutely couldn't agree with you more about is the G7. They are still powerful. Even if the economic gravity is shifting, there's no doubt that the G7 represents a lot of economic and political power in the world. My goodness they are moving slowly aren’t they? They are a long, long way... and it's insulting. You also think, it's sad that they think, and I have a horrible feeling that they're right, that their populations go along with this. In the West, this turn to populism and shift rightwards and this narrative of national greatness, whether it is being articulated by the US or the UK, is popular and we really need to be moving a long way past that. So, I do agree with you about the analysis of the G7 in this regard, but sad to say I think they are still pretty influential.
Banik I should also be fair to the West. it's not just the West that doesn't do their homework. it's also the Chinese. They've learnt of late, I'm thinking about Venezuela, the defaults there, they burnt their fingers in Venezuela. I've been studying another example of late in Kenya, the coal fired power plant in Lamu that was temporarily shut down, and now that project is cancelled. It was shut down by an environmental tribunal because locals protested against it. It turns out that the Chinese are also learning that they can't juts rely on consulting with dubiously elected persons or just the president or PM. There are legitimacy issues here, that's the government of the day does not always enjoy the confidence of the locals and there are NGOs and people's movements that are raising their voices against some of these major infrastructural projects, so doing environmental assessment reports and doing the homework better would actually prevent a lot of the problems down the road. I think the Chinese are learning, I just wish the West was also learning. But moving on to something else, Emma, one of the things that I noticed about SSC is that it is a very heterogeneous group of countries that are involved. One of course tends to think about India, China and Brazil, the big actors, but there are of course smaller actors involved, so that is one thing I'd like you to please help us better understand, maybe who among the smaller actors you think have been perhaps championing a newer version, perhaps a different version of SSC. And the other thing I noticed is that because of this heterogeneity, you have actors adopting different practices, so it is often difficult to just say there's this one model, right? So, I noticed for example, going back to this point about lack of expertise in terms of private sector companies being able to implement infrastructure projects, I know that it's not just the Western countries, even India doesn't have that many big companies that could implement these very ambitious infrastructure projects in Africa. China has maybe more than 100. So, India has been, as I understand it, highlighting frugal innovation, doing things cheaply, effective, adopting a different approach. So, basically what I'm trying to get at is if you could try to help us better understand the different types of modalities or strategies that are involved in this very broad umbrella that's often termed as SSC?
Mawdsley Yeah, I think it's so important. When I first started doing this work, my interest was caught by the emerging discussions about China-Africa, of course both China and Africa are places that stuck in our Western imaginations in different ways although many African countries of course were treated as one, and I think it casts a too strong a shadow of the rest of the Southern development partnerships. One of the things that I did, I was not an expert on China and I'm not an expert in any way on Africa, so as I started to become interested in this, I turned to the broader field of Southern development partnerships, very much learning as I was going, trying to understand better from different Southern perspectives what was happening. it became very clear to me that the analysis of Southern development partnerships wasn't overly colonised by the debate around China-Africa. So, it was fantastic to read, we know about Cuba's phenomenal contributions to healthcare partnerships, Indonesia has been an important regional partner, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, we know that Colombia has been very proactive in creating partnerships and programs in Latin America and beyond. Senegal offered assistance to Haiti after the earthquake there. I think it's really important because what it does, it's not that as it were emerging revisionist power politics aren't present through SSC, particularly the bigger powers, but it is so much more than that. And by looking at those smaller countries, more modest partnerships, it also shows how steep some of the other dimensions of Southern partnerships. We've seen those personal relations, and in some ways, I think, here too we see change. So, Indonesia has started to be much more assertive and pragmatic. We can see that in the language, pre-Trump, of Indonesia first. SO, it's not like the smaller countries are necessarily the virtuous holders of the tradition of Southern partnerships. They too are creating their foreign policy in this context. But you get a sense of the diversity, the value, the importance of Southern partnerships beyond the all-too-dominating lens of China-Africa. And then, yes, India is interesting because in some ways it is jealously emulating China, at the same time disparages it. The focus on frugal innovation I think is as much out of necessity as of desire. It also tends to, in some of the official rhetoric around China, it tends to demonise, create China as the other, but they are actually very similar in lots of ways.
Banik Indeed, and they even use similar terms, like win-win, mutual benefit, solidarity.
Mawdsley I think that comes from things like Bandung and that's fine, but India does use state-led enterprises and it sort of, they accuse the Chinese of being cold-hearted and Indians are warm hearted and so on. That's too simplistic. This goes back to an earlier point that the real complication, increasingly for all countries, certainly for the Southern partners, the blurred and blended nature of Southern partnerships, so private companies and state-owned enterprises that are not directly undertaking foreign policy agendas. They are doing business, and they get conflated with the geopolitical, geo-economic agendas of their home states, and there is blurring and blending for sure. But we see that there increasingly, the West moves into public private partnerships (PPPs), industrial policies, the collapsing of big D and little d development. This is going to also become depressing for countries like the UK. how do we look at McDonald's activities in Afghanistan? Who becomes responsible for decisions made down the line? And I think China and India are in the same boat. In Ethiopia, we know there are very controversial policies around the Ethiopian government handing over large amounts of land. Who is responsible then for the contestation of that as a development model? It's very hard to put it on India, on Ethiopia, it's a much more distributed process.
Banik So, what characterises the relationship between say these private sector actors, state-owned companies, and the government of say India, China, the other major SSC actors? How do they project their help or assistance or cooperation? Is it a useful way to deflect criticism if say private sector actors are involved or a project that never gets completed, you could always blame it on someone else, or is there a tendency to package all of this as coming from one country? What is the relationship or the contribution of private sector actors in SSC?
Mawdsley I think it's incredibly varied, even from company to company. I don't think we can put any singular explanation on it. And also, even the construct of private and public, we can see evolving doors, PPPs, contracting, there are so many complex relationships between companies. We know that in the case of India, there's a sense that some of the larger companies are able to have conversations inside the Ministry of Economic Affairs, in a way that smaller companies can't. Or they can access lines of credit. So, it isn't even like the private sector is able to act as India's champion. It's particular parts of the private sector, and they may or may not be able to draw down on various forms of relationships. So, I really don't think we can say. One state-owned enterprise in Brazil can be very different from another state-owned enterprise and certainly China's relationship with their SOEs is different. I think the reality is that we need to look into the detail of particular places, partnerships, experiences, which I know is a frustrating reply, but I don't think there is a singular narrative to be had. I think what does become interesting is to think about what the comparisons are. For example, if we think about Shell and to what extent the Netherlands or the UK are held responsible for the activities of Shell in say Angola. We can think about how the private sector is or isn’t evolving, and we see a closer relationship with governments right now through industrial policy strategies. So, I saw that PwC is about to launch an enormous investment in ESG employees and focus, and in a way, I think this will become the new form of accountability for non-aid development finance. But it's going to be a real difficult challenge to get past corporate greenwashing, corporate ESG-washing, whether we're talking about different actors.
Banik Among the many things I enjoy in your work is the focus you've often had on gifts and gift theory and many would say that countries in the Global South like India and China are doing is to somehow convey to recipient or junior partners in the South, here is a gift and we are doing it out of the kindness of our hearts, you have to be thankful and even though you may not have something now, maybe there's something that you can give us somewhere down the line in the near future. There is also this increased focus on giving visible gifts. I’ve noticed in Malawi and elsewhere there are these handover ceremonies. Sometimes really ridiculous, like two motorcycles that are gifted to the Ministry of Health, would require very expensive, far more expensive ceremony to actually hand over these motorcycles than what they cost in reality. So, gifts are very important to convey that these partners have good intentions etc. but there is a problematic relationship, right? If these gifts are not reciprocated, there is this feeling that even if a true gift is altruistic, it may be voluntary or unconditional, if it isn't reciprocated, then there could be some sort of a loss of prestige, feeling of inferiority, a penalty, thereby creating an unequal relationship. how do you think we should understand this performance of gift-giving by partners in the global South, under this SSC umbrella? Do you see certain problematic aspects or are these gifts seen to be a routine part of what characterises SSC?
Mawdsley I originally used gift theory, which derived from Mauss and Bourdieu and Sahlins and many others to try to argue that Southern, myth if you like, of Southern reciprocity, again not untrue but a very important claim, was not an inferior form of morality as opposed to the supposed altruism of aid. And of course, we know that aid is performed as altruistic but in fact we know that donors get a huge amount back for their aid. Nonetheless, aid is performed and widely understood as an altruistic donation from rich to poor, which really is a very poor understanding of what aid is and does. The Southern partners were very often critiqued for doing inferior aid, because they stressed reciprocity, and so I used gift theory to make the case for the moral value of that reciprocity because, as Marcel Mauss argued, the act of giving but also the act of choosing to receive, is also to choose to engage in a social relationship and then in gift theory, there is this concept that reciprocity is encoded in the expectation - I give you a birthday gift, I'd probably expect you might give one back, or buying each other a beer in a pub. And then Marshall Sahlins very importantly and Bourdieu, argued that the gift economy is all very well and good, but what happens if what partner or one gender or country is constantly actually, or appears to be, gifting, being the provider of the gift. And they talked about the way, then, gifts can act to create a symbolic regime of inequality. Ilan Kapoor wrote about this brilliantly in relation to foreign aid. This point, of course it is a performance of the gift, we mustn’t forget that aid is a tool for national interest and donors get money back, they get influence, they get all sorts of things, but it is performed as this singular gift. And it does seem to me, as you say, if we think of something like Covid-vaccine diplomacy, the importance of the performance of that gifting has overtaken the value of that sense of reciprocity and it's harder and harder to sustain the always somewhat fictional idea of equal partners coming together. I was talking to one very senior and influential champion of Indian development partnerships, we had a great conversation, he was telling me about what India was gifting to Nepal, and I said: you know, you haven't mentioned one single thing that India is getting from Nepal. And he said: oh my god, I haven't. I think that very understandably, in some ways, of course he'd fallen into that 'we are the country that can provide.' This is a lesson that everyone needs to learn. In a project that I'm running now, and in my work, and the work of others, really brilliantly trying to put that press on South to North learning, South to North policy transfer, and again to come back to an earlier point about collaboration, if we could just place ourselves together and think, let's learn from each other, what expertise can we bring to the board, and we could do so much better, and instead, to return to the G7, this 'the West will provide' and it's a shame. Gift theory gives us a handle on some of the symbolic violence of that idea.
Banik This pandemic has created some new trends in SSC. The past five decades, how SSC has flowed, maybe sometimes I get the impression that it has been these major powers, India and China providing assistance as their economies grew, there was more expertise, more money, more assistance provided, but now the pandemic seems to have changed things a bit because, I mentioned this to you earlier, how Kenya has provided food aid to India when India was going through its second wave. So, I see some sort of reciprocity taking place now and maybe this could continue in the sense that many countries on the African continent have successfully tackled Ebola and many other crises that other countries could learn from. Could we end on some sort of an optimistic note, I shouldn't ask you to end on an optimistic note if you don't agree, but can I get you to please reflect on how you see the future of SSC? Are you optimistic? Do you see certain changes taking place because of the pandemic or do you think we'll return to how things were in the next couple of years?
Mawdsley I would love to end on a positive note. It's quite important to try to critically seek out points of hope and optimism because otherwise it's all too easy to fall into despair. So, yes, I think there are things in the pandemic that have happened that could be really positive. So, if you remember the teams of Cuban doctors arriving in Andorra and Italy, the ways in which, there was some sort of quiet cooperation between India and China at some point early on, the Kenyan donation of food. I think it's also a great example of the way in which, and I hope we see more of this, that we know that a number of African and Asian countries knew what to do and did it quickly. of course, like any other country, that doesn't mean it's been seamless, I think Vietnam is now struggling a bit more, but they were so much better prepared than the so-called richer countries. Why don't we learn from that? And why don’t we also ensure that unlike Ebola, we start thinking about healthcare systems, we all learn that these events come around again and again, so what could we change about these vertical funds dropping in money to specific diseases and think about healthcare systems. Let’s learn from Cuba, please, about some of those things. It would be really wonderful, and you can hear that I don't sound entirely convinced, take some of the essential lessons from the pandemic of living in a hugely interconnected world in which many Southern partners and actors, not just countries but organisations, have critical expertise, I'm sure you've had the same experience - if you get some forms of gut infection, the place I want to be treated is in India, because the expertise lies there. And we need to see that the world challenges we face, we need the expertise of the South. And we need to collaborate. So, I'd like to think that some of those experiences in the pandemic will drive us together and not apart.
Banik It was wonderful to see you again, Emma. Thanks so much for coming on my show.
Mawdsley Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure.
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Thank you for listening to In Pursuit of Development with Professor Dan Banik from the University of Oslo’s Centre for Development and the Environment. Please email your questions, comments and suggestions to inpursuitofdevelopment@gmail.com.