Learning from Brazilian civil society agri-food justice initiatives illustrates how we can broaden South-South dialogue for progressive social and environmental policy.
South-South cooperation (SSC) often stands for counter-hegemonic alliances between nation states offering an alternative to Northern dominated development assistance frameworks, challenged for being ineffective and underpinned by a colonial legacy. Although framed in a language of horizontality and reciprocity, SSC has frequently entailed the transfer of policy templates from one Southern country to another. There is scarce evidence, however, of truly mutual leaning exchange. And even if successful in the context of origin, policy solutions do not readily travel across contexts, despite claims of South-South affinity and similarity.
In a paper recently presented at the Development Studies Association 2021 conference, we consider the case of Brazil that emerged at the end of the previous decade as a Southern power. Ten years on, the government’s cooperation agenda has diminished in scope significantly and its Southern solidarity narrative has been toned down, not least vis-à-vis Africa. Yet, other spaces for South-South interaction and solidarity have remained active and are worthy of attention.
The paper highlights policy dialogue and learning involving civil society organisations, social movements, and researchers working in policy advocacy, campaigning and action-research related to food security, agroecology and agrifood justice. It analyses their use of ‘collective action frames’ to promote dialogue and learning across different socio-cultural settings.
Collective action frames
The international exchanges involving civil society organisations, networks and social movements operating in the agrifood sphere encompass diverse modes of interaction, including transnational alliances that emerged since the 1990s. The transnationalisation of social movements has involved a constant translation of concepts and practices across contexts. Transnational social movements devising ‘collective action frames’ to contest dominant assumptions and practices. Such frames diagnose situations as problematic, propose solutions, and call for action to achieve them.
Two cases are illustrative of collective action frames in action in South-South interactions involving Brazilian actors. Such frames have bridged four themes: food sovereignty, solidarity economy, seeds biodiversity, and agroecology. In the two cases, participants approached policy as a basis for mutual learning, rather than as templates for transfer.
Brazil-Mozambique cooperation on native seeds
In 2008, the Brazilian Small Farmers Movement (MPA) and the Mozambican National Peasants’ Union (UNAC) began cooperating on native seeds’ conservation and management. Both organisations are affiliated to La Via Campesina, sharing an active stance in the protection of farmers’ rights and in opposition to industrialised corporate-controlled agriculture.
The project adopted a peasant-to-peasant methodology. Actions comprising technical and political dimensions were jointly planned, and a study group was formed on the theme of seeds, involving union leaders, farmers and technicians. A participatory methodology was developed and implemented for the selection of seeds to be cultivated, considering the crop species and varieties already managed by farmers, risks of extinction, cultural significance of food, and marketing opportunities. Specific cultivation areas were set up to produce seeds and improve their quality.
The main objective of the initiative was not to transfer technologies but to strengthen the capacity of a group of people linked to UNAC to develop a work stream on native seeds in line with the common framing around food sovereignty. At the national level, UNAC created a working group to discuss seed policy and regulation, also acting on an international level. A project related to the promotion of food sovereignty through native seeds is currently being carried out within UNAC.
Action-research on agroecology and solidarity economy
Two action-research projects have brought together researcher-activists across several localities in South America into a mutual learning process:
- Agroecology-based solidarity economy in Bolivia and Brazil (AgroEcos). AgroEcos plays on the double meaning of ‘echos’ (EcoSol): echoing and replicating good practices across space and time. The project has brought together practitioners across many networks through regular webinars.
- Food sovereignty through agroecology in South America brings together research teams in six countries (Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru).
Both projects focus on agro-ecological producers’ initiatives developing short food-supply chains that bring producers closer to consumers. The AgroEcos project originally aimed to identify collective capacities for developing short chains. Given the ambiguous term ‘short’, this was sharpened through the concept ‘proximities’. Solidaristic short chains comprise several kinds of proximity: geographical, organisational, social, cultural, etc.
Both projects have unpacked the notion of solidarity economy. A key source of inspiration has been the traditional mutirão, the Guarani word for joint work or mutual aid relationships. Such relationships may constitute ‘community’ in many senses. In particular, coming from Indigena Originario Campesinos, Bolivia’s EcolSol-agroecology initiatives seek to renew their peasant ancestry; they use the term ‘communitarian economy’ rather than solidarity economy. By contrast, in urban areas where such traditions have become marginal, they need to be reconstituted anew as a basis for solidarity economy. These geographical-cultural specificities help to illuminate and situate the social meaning of key concepts and bridge differences.
Frame bridging for rebuilding differently
In ways analogous to transnational social movements, these spaces for South-South interaction bridge diverse frames for more effective counter-hegemonic agendas.
- They explore context-dependent meanings of the same frame, e.g., food sovereignty, solidarity economy.
- They use methodologies conducive to peer-to-peer learning, helping to develop a common understanding of key terms and practitioners’ experiences across diverse contexts.
- They focus on ideas, practices or processes for stakeholder groups to create solutions that suit their own contexts and demand appropriate policies.
Such forms of cooperation and dialogue contrast with inter-governmental efforts to compare (often presuming similarities) or transfer policy templates.
Researchers have an important role facilitating such spaces, learning themselves from the practitioners’ exchanges and helping to translate their experiences across diverse contexts. They can play a part in building interfaces between different arenas or modalities of South-South interaction. This role can help to enrich and democratise SSC.
Broader and more plural forms of South-South learning can help to intervene in the global debate on a post-pandemic future. When the Covid-19 pandemic began, global elites initially advocated means for a ‘return to normal’. Soon this was softened as ‘Building Back Better’. Through a Great Reset, global elite claims moral authority for ‘management of a global commons’, despite decades of systematically degrading and enclosing the commons.
By contrast with those elite agendas, solidaristic agro-ecological exchanges promote collective capacities to protect commons, constructing a different ‘normal’ based on solidaristic relationships rather than market competition, and thus eventually displacing the agri-industrial food system. This means ‘rebuilding differently’, rather than seeking a better version of a destructive system. South-South exchanges can contribute to such efforts through practices of solidarity, reciprocity, and mutual learning. Such exchanges make space for diverse actors and experiences, thus strengthening a common effort.
This blog is a summary of a paper jointly presented by the authors at the DSA 2021 Unsettling Development (28 June – 2 July 2021: Online Conference at UEA). The IDS-CPDA/UFRRJ collaboration is supported by the Brazil IDS Initiative, a platform where researchers can share, learn and work together to strengthen development thinking and practice in Brazil, and on Brazil’s role in development cooperation.
Lídia Cabral is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, UK. Les Levidow is a Senior Research Fellow at the Open University, UK. Claudia Job Schmitt is Associate Professor at the Post-Graduate Program in Social Sciences of Development, Agriculture and Society, Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
