Emerging Development Partners and Aid Governance: Examining the Role of 'Aid Effectiveness' in South African and Indonesian South-South Cooperation

The past few decades have witnessed an unprecedented shift in the international system, as the collapse of Cold War era bipolarity and rapid economic growth in several developing nations have produced dramatic shifts in the global geography of power. As a result, prominent countries of the Global South are playing increasingly important roles in global governance. One aspect of this shift has been the diminishment of Northern hegemony in the realm of official development assistance, and the growing importance of South-South development cooperation. This paper utilizes case studies of South African and Indonesian international cooperation programs to examine the emerging relationships between increasingly active development partners of the Global South and the “mainstream” development architecture established by the OECD-DAC. The case studies reveal widely divergent patterns in the attitudes which emerging powers have adopted toward the status quo development establishment, which this paper seeks to explain through an analysis of the normative discourse surrounding each country's development partnerships, the institutional capacities of their implementing agencies, and their relative positions in the international balance of power.