Active non-alignment: Brazil and the measurement of south-south development cooperation

Measuring South-South cooperation (SSC) has gained policy and political salience in International
Development Cooperation (IDC) debates in recent decades. This article applies the concept of
active non-alignment to analyze the efforts of “southern providers”, such as Brazil, for autonomous,
differentiated, and proactive engagement in the measurement debate, as well as in the field of
international development more broadly. The article combines analyses of foreign policy and public
policy and traces the evolution, since 2010, of the international debate and the Brazilian response –
diplomatic, institutional, and non-governmental – to the growing “duty of measuring” the flows
and impact of its SSC. Far from being purely a technical issue, the reconstruction of processes and
negotiations surrounding the creation of measurement instruments and practices to count
and account for Brazilian SSC contribute to illustrating political, geopolitical, and (inter)bureaucratic
disputes in the production of transnational public policies, such as Brazil’s IDC.