South-South Cooperation through the Lenses of Bureaucrats: Peripheral Policy Transfers

Cooperação Sul-Sul através das lentes dos burocratas: transferências de políticas periféricas

Abstract

As Brazil makes it to international headlines with its new official stance against human rights and environmental protection, one can hardly imagine that the country was, at one point, engaged in human rights cooperation in the Global South. Most of these projects were outside of the media’s radar, as they were low-budget initiatives developed in small and poor countries. One might reasonably ask: Why engage in small, low-profile projects on marginalized topics in the peripheries of the Global South? This article addresses this question by presenting data and testimonies of individuals working on two of those experiences, namely Brazil’s cooperation with Haiti for the promotion of the rights of persons with disabilities; and Brazil’s cooperation with El Salvador for the protection of children against violence and abuse. This article will suggest that the answer to the proposed research question is to be found in the rich experiences these projects brought to the bureaucrats who were, in their own domestic contexts, struggling to secure a place for their policy issues in the agenda.

Keywords
South-South cooperation; human rights; policy transfer; Brazil; Haiti; El Salvador