Combining the Best of North-South and South-South development cooperation

This paper has been authored by Dr Malancha Chakrabarty and Dr Swati Prabhu.

The Covid-19 pandemic pushed most economies into recession and heightened inequalities within and across countries. Mitigating current challenges requires greater solidarity, innovative thinking, and more effective international development cooperation. This paper makes a case for triangular cooperation as an instrument of development cooperation in current times. It outlines its advantages, examines the challenges involved in such partnerships, and explores India’s experience with triangular partnerships. It focuses on the physical infrastructure sector—historically characterised by lumpy investments and long project duration—and evaluates the suitability of the triangular set-up for development projects in the sector.

Covid 19

The immediate impacts of the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic were partially averted through emergency response measures. However, as the crisis pushed economies into recession and inequalities rose sharply, both within and across countries—new risks such as high public and private debt emerged. According to estimates by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), global debt rose by 28 percentage points in 2020 to 256% of Gross Domestic Product in 2020 and borrowing by governments accounted for more than half of the increase in global debt. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 worsened the global economic prospects and presented grave challenges of hunger and food insecurity in the developing world. Indeed, the World Economic Outlook 2022 has downgraded the global growth prospects to 3.2% in 2022 and 2.9% in 2023—respectively, 0.4% and 0.7% lower than the forecast in April 2022. The IMF also warns that the world is on the edge of another global recession. Given the scale of the current global challenges, the world needs greater solidarity, innovative thinking, and more effective international development cooperation.

Triangular cooperation, as a development modality, offers advantages. The term ‘triangular cooperation’ broadly refers to projects and initiatives that combine the comparative advantages of traditional donors and southern countries, to share knowledge and address development concerns in developing countries. The terms ‘triangular’ and ‘trilateral’ are often used synonymously to refer to this kind of development cooperation, but Rhee (2011) makes a distinction between them. ‘Triangular development cooperation’ refers to northern and multilateral support for long-standing and continuing South–South cooperation by ‘traditional’ partners, often under the auspices of the United Nations (UN). Trilateral development cooperation, meanwhile, refers to a formalised North–South–South development relationship. While this distinction is analytically useful, in practice they are often used interchangeably, as this paper does.

The paper can be accessed by clicking here

https://www.orfonline.org/research/combining-the-best-of-north-south-and-south-south-development-cooperation/

This paper has been authored by Dr Malancha Chakrabarty and Dr Swati Prabhu.