LAUSR

How do Brazilian bureaucrats view their country’s international development actions regarding South-South cooperation? This paper draws upon interviews collected during field research in Brasilia in October/November 2012 with diplomats and public servants from 25 federal ministries and institutions of the Brazilian federal government, all of which directly involved with implementing technical cooperation agreements. The evidence showed great conversion in the worldviews and principled values upheld by the public servants and diplomats in terms of Brazilian foreign policy; it also brought to light many inter-bureaucratic complaints and struggles. The prospect is that Brazil’s international cooperation actions will continue in the years to come, hence it is essential to have a better institutional dialogue between diplomats and public servants who execute the agreements – as well as the presidency – regarding each other’s expectations and operational capacities in order to guarantee sustainability of Brazil’s technical cooperation initiatives. The findings are relevant for better understanding the inner works of Brazilian South-South actions, and can be used for comparison to other countries’ bureaucracies imbued in conceptualizing and implementing South-South knowledge transfers.