Brazil's Emerging Role in Global Governance

Health, Food Security and Bioenergy

M. Fraundorfer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137491213
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Handel & Tarife

The author examines Brazil's emerging role as an important actor in various sectors of global governance. By exploring how Brazil's exercise of power developed over the last decade in the sectors of health, food security and bioenergy, this book sheds light on the power strategies of an emerging country from the global south.

1

Introduction

a) The research puzzle

This book is an attempt to provide new answers to the research question of how Brazil has exercised power in the mechanisms of global governance since the beginning of the new century, and how this exercise of power has developed on various interfaces of global governance.

This research question arises from a fundamental theoretical and empirical puzzle in a situation of transformation and change in the international system. A political phenomenon which characterised the last decade in international politics was the economic and political rise of a group of countries from the global south, which Jim O’Neill of the investment bank Goldman Sachs acronymised as the BRICs (Brazil, Russia,¹ India and China) (O’Neill 2001).²

Given their continental dimensions, these countries have the potential to challenge the existing global order and advocate new paradigms in the international system. The BRICs acronym itself is the most obvious sign for this ongoing transformation and aroused significant enthusiasm among scholars of International Relations (IR).

In a follow-up report published in 2007, Goldman Sachs further encouraged the increasing enthusiasm by concluding that ‘[o]ur “BRICs dream” that these countries together could overtake the combined GDP of the G7 by 2035 […] remains a worthy “dream” ’ (Goldman Sachs 2007: 5). The BRICs are the largest economies outside the OECD. While in the year 2000 only one of them appeared in the list of the top ten economies by GDP, namely China at number six, in 2013 all of the four BRIC countries figured among the top ten biggest economies by GDP with China coming second, Brazil sixth, Russia ninth and India tenth (Ro 2013; Wilson et al. 2011: 8).

This economic rise has also been accompanied by a political rise of these countries in the international political system. The most obvious example of the new political role these countries play in the international system refers to the curious creation of the BRIC(S) summits. Based on the BRICs acronym, these countries actually came together in 2009 to celebrate the first BRIC summit in Yekaterinburg, Russia, with the intention of forming a common position on a variety of global challenges and establishing a new front to challenge the established powers.

Since 2009, the BRIC have repeated their summit every year, with each one taking place in a different BRIC country (2010 in Brasília, Brazil; 2011 in Sanya, China; 2012 in New Delhi, India; 2013 in Durban, South Africa; 2014 in Fortaleza, Brazil). In 2010, the BRIC foreign ministers decided to invite South Africa to join the BRIC, which for the first time attended the 2011 BRIC summit in Sanya, China, turning the BRIC into the BRICS (BRICS 2013a). Apart from increased cooperation among these countries and the creation of other institutional mechanisms,³ they decided at the 2013 summit to establish a BRICS development bank as a counterpart to the Bretton Woods institutions (BRICS 2013a).

It remains to be seen how this alliance, consisting of hugely diverse countries with very different political systems, will further develop.⁴ Nonetheless, this unique process of institutionalisation of the cooperation efforts among these countries, based on the potential economic outlook, can be seen as a reflection of this transformative process and the new developments taking place in the international system. Apart from the BRICS alliance, these countries have also demonstrated their political clout through other alliances such as IBSA and BASIC.

IBSA was formed on the initiative of Brazil’s ex-president Lula da Silva in 2003 as a grouping of Brazil, India and South Africa. IBSA has developed into a coordination mechanism among the three emerging countries on a variety of different political issues including health, agriculture, energy, science and technology, climate change and others (Andrade et al. 2010).

These emerging powers have also made clear to the world that they have a say in climate change negotiations. In the run-up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December 2009, Brazil, South Africa, India and China formed a new coalition called the BASIC group (Dasgupta 2009; Hunter 2010). By establishing an organised front, the BASIC countries brokered the final Copenhagen Accord with the US (Hunter 2010: 7). While the Copenhagen Accord itself was no more than a weak political agreement without real consequences (Hunter 2010: 15), the BASIC countries showed that they were willing to act together in global climate change negotiations. After Copenhagen, the BASIC countries have met on a continuous basis to coordinate a common position among themselves and other developing countries for the following Climate Change Summits (ICTSD 2012).

What began as an enthusiastic report by an economist who optimistically summarised the economic outlook of a group of countries of continental dimension and coined the BRIC acronym with a clear economic meaning has, over the course of one decade, assumed a life of its own. The BRIC countries, on their own initiative, started to form several alliances, with the aim of gaining more leverage in the international system and building a new front of emerging countries from the global south, which the developed countries can no longer ignore. As a result, the BRIC acronym gained an unintended political meaning, as these countries attempted to assert themselves in the international system.

From this new situation in the international system, the following puzzle has emerged, which has engaged an increasing amount of scholars in IR. How has this political rise been possible for countries from the global south, which in the last century had only limited importance in international affairs and, with a few exceptions, were not able to continuously influence the international agenda or shape the mechanisms and organisations of the international system? Which are the strategies employed by these new powers and how do they use them to increasingly influence decision-making processes in the international system and contribute to the shaping of the international agenda? And what are the consequences of their activities for the international system?

In an international system dominated by the developed countries from Europe and North America, emerging powers from the developing world are confronted with considerable obstacles (Ikenberry and Wright 2008: 3). Ikenberry and Wright called the developed countries, in particular the US, ‘creators, owners, managers, and chief beneficiaries’ of the international system (Ikenberry and Wright 2008: 3).⁵ And yet, Hurrell observed that emerging countries are no longer sitting at the margins of the chess board of world politics, merely observing how the developed countries perform in the global power game (Hurrell 2010). Brazil in particular provides a good example of the new role emerging powers can play in global governance. Hurrell argued that ‘[t]he Lula administration’s achievement has been to help reinforce this new reality, while demonstrating the degree to which Brazil has become an influential player in the new global order’ in its principal foreign policy goal to present itself as a weighty contender for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council (Hurrell 2010: 65–6).

For instance, Brazil’s wide-ranging international activities in international development issues over the course of the last decade transformed the country into one of the largest aid donors worldwide (The Economist 2010a). In this context, the annual budget for technical assistance of Brazil’s Cooperation Agency (ABC) increased between 2003 and 2011 from around US$ 2 million to around US$ 22 million (Presidency of the Federative Republic of Brazil 2011: 2). In the same vein, between 2003 and 2010, Brazil cancelled debts in Africa worth some US$ 1 billion, and trade between Brazil and African countries has increased from US$ 4 billion in 2000 to US$ 27.7 billion in 2011 (Ogier 2012).

This book starts from the assumption that Brazil’s exercise of power and its subsequent ability to shape the structures and processes in global governance developed on the basis of its activities in three different sectors of global governance, namely global health, the global system of food security and global environmental governance. In accordance with Hannah Arendt’s conception of power as ‘action in concert’ (Arendt 1970: 44) Brazil successfully interacted in these three sectors on many fronts with other state and non-state actors alike and contributed to the shaping of global governance mechanisms based on three national solutions for development challenges, which were extremely successful in Brazil. These three solutions refer to Brazil’s National AIDS Programme, the Zero Hunger strategy and the decades-long experience in producing ethanol.

b) The sectoral dimension of global governance

Several scholars have approached the analysis of Brazil’s increasing influence in the international system from Brazil’s position as a regional power in South America (see Hurrell 2000; Nel et al. 2012). Flemes argued that Brazil aimed to strengthen its status as a regional power to become a serious contender for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council (Flemes 2010: 102) and, in this context, used its own region ‘South America primarily as a geo-strategic power base for the pursuit of its interests in world politics’ (Flemes 2010: 110). And yet, Malamud (2011) discovered an increasing mismatch between Brazil’s regional and global performance. While the other South American nations have not accepted Brazil’s leadership within its own region, the country has managed to play an unprecedented role on the global stage (Malamud 2011: 18–19). In Bethell’s words, ‘Brazil has a presence and influence on the international stage that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago’ (Bethell 2010). Due to this unprecedented global role, Brazil provides an excellent case study for a detailed analysis of how this country increased its influence in the international political system.

To shed light on this question, I turn my attention towards Brazil’s activities in the mechanisms of three sectors of global governance, namely global health, the global system of food security and global environmental governance. According to Narlikar, ‘mechanisms of global governance serve as playgrounds and battlegrounds where the resolves of new and old powers are put to the test, and where different actors compete and cooperate for influence’ (Narlikar 2013: 564). At the same time, ‘these same mechanisms can offer valuable sites for the engagement and socialization of new powers, or indeed avenues for containment and estrangement [and as such] are vital to an understanding of how power transition is negotiated’ (Narlikar 2013: 564).

Since ‘[t]ransnational circuits of power are increasingly organizing around sectors and issue-areas rather than around holistic national interests’ (Cerny 2012: 198), the most appropriate way to analyse the rising influence of an emerging power like Brazil is a focus on the sectors of global governance, most conveniently more than just one sector, to get a more general understanding of Brazil’s power strategies and how these might differ (or not) from one governance sector to the other (Breitmeier et al. 2009: 16). Only through this comparative approach based on analysing Brazil’s increasing influence in a variety of different governance sectors will it be possible to assess Brazil’s exercise of power and its increasing influence in the international system.

The mechanisms of global governance are not equally developed in all its different sectors, for the BRICS countries are emerging within an international system which is always in flux (Wilkinson 2002: 2–3). Given the disparities across different global governance sectors, Wilkinson emphasises that this ‘evolving character of global governance brings with it moments of opportunity – moments in which pressure can be brought to bear on the emerging patterns of governance’ (Wilkinson 2002: 3). These moments can be used by emerging powers to change the actual constitution of global governance mechanisms (Wilkinson 2002: 3). These moments of opportunity (Ikenberry and Wright call them ‘multiple access points’) emerge all the more in the face of the particular nature of the international system. Its extremely complex, interdependent and multi-layered nature – involving on the one hand a multiplicity of participation and cooperation mechanisms and on the other hand a multitude of actors, institutions and regulations – provides a favourable playground for the emerging powers to change the actual constitution of global governance mechanisms (Ikenberry and Wright 2008: 11).

The sector of global health governance can be considered as a highly developed and institutionalised governance sector, providing an excellent playground where ‘multiple access points’ and ‘moments of opportunity’ emerge (Hein et al. 2007; Hein and Moon 2013). Health has been one of the principal pillars of Brazil’s foreign policy in the last decade (Cepik and Paes de Sousa 2011). In addition, the Minister of Health between 2007 and 2010, José Gómes Temporão, emphasised that ‘health opens doors’, alluding to the potential of cooperation on health issues (SBI 2010). In comparison, the other two sectors are less developed and institutionalised. While the global system of food security may not be as highly developed and institutionalised as the sector of global health governance, it still relies on more coherent governance mechanisms than is the case in global environmental governance (Clapp and Cohen 2009; Clapp and Wilkinson 2010; Elliott 2002; Drexhage 2008).

With governance sectors which find themselves in different states of development, institutionalisation, connectivity and actor participation, it will be instructive to see how Brazil has been able to cope with these differences and disparities within the international system. These three governance sectors all deal with so-called ‘soft-policy’ issues, which greatly encourage the emergence of ‘multiple access points’ and ‘moments of opportunity’. In global health governance this fact holds particularly true, as Bartsch and Kohlmorgen explain (2007: 7, 12): First, the very nature of global health governance, composed of a variety of different actors, levels and regulations provides new opportunities and niches for the so-called weak actors in the international system, civil society organisations (CSOs) and emerging powers. Second, the relevant health issues themselves, such as the fight against HIV/AIDS, are of utmost significance for developing countries and thus should be at the top of their political agendas. After all, it is in those countries where issues such as HIV/AIDS, the state of food (in)security and other development issues are most prominent.

In addition, it makes perfect sense to concentrate the analysis on sectors which explicitly deal with development challenges. In particular in the last decade, development issues have assumed a fundamental importance in global governance with the Millennium Development Declaration in 2000 and the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals. In the developing world the consequences of poor health governance, food insecurity and environmental degradation threaten the lives of millions of people. In this context, the engagement of an actor in improving the global governance mechanisms for more adequate health, food security and environmental governance can be considered as a different kind of security and defence politics. No state is stable or secure when the majority of its society suffers from a devastating epidemic like HIV/AIDS or lacks sufficient access to food. Similarly, the effects of climate change and environmental degradation have increasingly added to the situation of instability and insecurity in the majority of developing countries.

c) The organisation of the book

This book explores how Brazil’s exercise of power developed over the last decade in three sectors of global governance. The focus lies on Brazil’s interactions with other state and non-state actors to confirm the initial assumption that Brazil’s exercise of power primarily evolved in concert with others.

Chapter 2 starts with a short characterisation of the structures of global governance, before it introduces the theoretical framework of the book. The theoretical framework emphasises the multi-dimensional aspect of power and presents Hannah Arendt’s view on power as ‘action in concert’. Furthermore, it elaborates on the three theoretical concepts used for the analysis – the concepts of social interface, narrative and nodal governance – and distinguishes three types of interface along with three types of power which are used to analyse Brazil’s activities. The concept of nodal governance is further developed by introducing the new terms ‘governmental gateway node’ and ‘intergovernmental gateway node’.

After these preliminary considerations, the book proceeds to the empirical part and Brazil’s activities in global governance. Chapter 3 focuses its attention on Brazil’s global fight against HIV/AIDS. After giving a basic idea of the latest developments in global health governance, a short summary of Brazil’s National AIDS Programme is provided. Thereafter, the analysis concentrates on Brazil’s activities on the three global interfaces developed on the basis of the concept of social interface in Chapter 2, namely the discursive interface, the organisational interface and the resource-transfer interface. In this sense, the concept of social interface serves as a structuring tool to better analyse Brazil’s manifold activities in global governance.

On the discursive interface, the focus lies on the examination of the discursive activities of the US, Brazil, the pharmaceutical industry, the global AIDS movement and the US media during the WTO Trade Dispute on patent rights between the US and Brazil in the first half of 2001. On the organisational interface, the attention turns to Brazil’s successful negotiations for better access to medicines in the context of the WTO, the World Health Assembly and the UN Human Rights Council in the months and years following the WTO Trade Dispute on patent rights. The resource-transfer interface concentrates on Brazil’s resource-transfer activities in the form of networking and nodal design efforts.

Chapter 4 shifts the attention to Brazil’s activities in the global system of food security. It provides a basic idea of the principal actors and mechanisms in the global system of food security and introduces the main rationale of Lula da Silva’s Zero Hunger strategy. Thereafter, the discursive interface examines Lula da Silva’s global campaign to eradicate hunger and poverty. The organisational interface concentrates on analysing Brazil’s leading role in the reform process of the FAO Committee on World Food Security. And the res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Theoretical Considerations
• 3. Brazil’s Global Fight against HIV/AIDS
• 4. Brazil’s Global Fight against Hunger and Poverty
• 5. Brazil’s Production of Sugarcane-Based Ethanol
• 6. Conclusion
• Appendix: List of Interviews
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index