Multilateral discursive spaces: “South-South cooperation” at the United Nations

At the United Nations (UN), the discursive spaces of “South-South cooperation” have visibly expanded over the last two decades, reflected in speeches, collaboration mechanisms and organisational arrangements. This paper focuses on how this expansion has unfolded, and how this relates to multilateral practices. It follows the understanding of discourse as structures of meaning making that foreground the powerful relationship between terminology and social practices. First, the paper traces and analyses “South-South cooperation” terminology since the 1970s in order to provide evidence not only for the expanding use but also the evolution of terms employed to depict cooperation among countries (self-)qualified as developing. Second, I examine different meanings attached to “South-South cooperation” across UN spaces, based on the analysis of UN documents, official accounts from member state governments and interviews with UN officials. I identify three major – both overlapping and competing – strands of what “South-South cooperation” is understood to stand for, reflecting inter alia different regional approaches and traditions. Third, I trace these three strands of meaning through the day-to-day engagement of different UN entities, including the UN Development Programme and the World Health Organisation. I show how a lack of formal and informal agreements on concrete definitions and operationalisations of “South-South cooperation” has led to both widening its discursive clout at the UN while, at the same time, making it particularly prone to political contestation. This, in turn, has contributed to an idiosyncratic combination of expanding and shrinking spaces of “South-South cooperation”-related practices, particularly against the backdrop of power shifts and tensions between “North” and “South”. Overall, this paper focuses on one aspect of the specifically “international” dimension of (the study of) discourse: multilateral plurality, shaped not only by the amalgamation and/or parallel trajectories of different national and regional patterns of meaning making but also by those of member state representatives, international bureaucrats and related bodies of expertise. The focus on “South- South cooperation” suggests that this plurality of voices and practices contributes to creating specific multilateral discursive spaces that, while often claiming to provide a common denominator for global engagement, might have little to do with meaning making patterns at regional, national or subnational levels.