Some time ago I had the chance to talk to an investigation official of the national police of a Latin American country at a meeting I was invited to attend as an evaluator.

A great deal is being done in this area through the technical support of institutions, including Spanish ones, whilst scrupulously avoiding the application of “models” from other countries to a national reality that is totally foreign and extremely complex. The United States, for example, has focused particularly on the issues of drugs and youth gangs. In Spain, we have great experience, and here I can mention, for example, the work done in Guatemala to reduce the number of crimes against life and amount of violence against women.

The official I was speaking with said that, in his country, the police are under great stress, that they’ve been doing their job under great pressure for several years, and that many of them would like to leave the field and get a university degree or do something else or, at least, have a better system of shifts that would give them more down time.

He also told me that they had learned that a small number of criminals commit the vast number of crimes, and that if there are, say, 10,000 homicide victims annually, these could be attributed to some 1,000 aggressors. That is, with a little investigation, with good police instincts and better coordination between prosecutors, judges and law enforcement, the problem of citizen insecurity could be handled much better.

“Don’t leave us on our own”, he said, worried about the low level of support they had internally and the idea that these issues could cease to be a cooperation priority. That’s probably the way things are seen by some people who are tired of supporting an institution that we can characterise as weak-strong-absent-present.

Weak in terms of the strategic direction, given that many bodies work on the same issues in an uncoordinated way: criminal investigation, prosecutors, judges, prisons, institutions that fight against organised crime… Strong, because at times these institutions think the only acceptable answer for society is the incarceration of young people; this accomplishes nothing except filling up prisons, where, on the other hand, there are few rehabilitation programmes to help them abandon the cycle of violence. Absent, because the police and judges are never where they’re needed, and they don’t reach many places where criminals are still being lynched. And, lastly, present, because the government is eager for media coverage and to demonstrate that citizen insecurity is its great priority, without us knowing what that actually means.

Public policy evaluation

That’s why it’s necessary to improve our diagnoses by using tools like public policy evaluation to be able to improve programmes and address these challenges that generate such contradictory responses from institutions.

And we have an extensive experience working with many institutions to be able to introduce evaluations as a requirement in implementing cooperation programmes for institutional reform. And we have also generated the necessary trust, which will enable us to conduct not only qualitative analyses but also quantitative ones, with baselines and surveys after several years.

At first glance, it seems easier to quantify the impact of aid in the case of social programmes or poverty-reduction programmes, which are where these types of evaluations have traditionally been done. However if we observe carefully from the institutional standpoint and, more specifically, from one of capacity building, there are many interesting options.

If the programmes are designed from the start with the objective of being evaluated, we could predict their impact on police performance; to give an example, the impact of one type of training or another, and eventually, the impact this has on institutional change and crime reduction, which is the important thing. It would also be a great advance, and we’re capable of doing it, to learn what effect the training of criminal investigation units has on the impunity variable. That is, in terms of how much our cooperation helps in terms of solving cases and the ability to bring them to trial.

That way the institutions themselves will be more aware of the limitations and opportunities that exist for carrying out larger-scale reforms and for gradually building a new culture of institutional development.

Miguel Angel Lombardo works at FIIAPP on South-South cooperation for public policy evaluation in Latin America.

What is South-South cooperation?

It’s the horizontal cooperation that countries in the South, in the broad sense of the word, undertake among themselves to try to resolve some of their development dilemmas with solutions applicable to their most concrete needs.

When did the trend of South-South cooperation get started?

There are various ways of approaching this. On one hand, with a more complete chronology, covering more than 50 years of history. The 1954 Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Bandung is considered the start of South-South cooperation in the broadest sense.

On the other, in the last decade and a half, let’s say from the start of this century, there has been a very significant intensification of the number of international events and South-South cooperation projects recorded on the planet. To give you an idea, in just the past five or six years there have been more international events and global conferences on South-South cooperation than in the entire previous 60 years.

South-South cooperation has a very long history, going back to that Bandung Conference, and it passed a very important milestone at the Buenos Aires Conference in 1978 with the establishment of the Buenos Aires Action Plan, which will be 40 years-old next year.

How many projects and countries has South-South cooperation moved in recent years?

The Ibero-American Secretariat General, SEGIB, based here in Madrid, which includes 22 Ibero-American countries (Spain, Portugal, Andorra and all of Latin America, from Mexico to Chile, including the Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries, i.e. Cuba and the Dominican Republic) represents the only region in the world that systematically records the South-South cooperation projects that take place.

SEGIB has been recording them for eight years in the Ibero-American South-South cooperation report. This reflects all the South-South cooperation undertaken between countries.

The latest cooperation report, published last year, recorded 580 South-South cooperation projects and more than 400 initiatives, which are smaller projects. So we’re talking about over 900 initiatives involving this type of cooperation in the region in just the past year.

In the rest of the world, it’s very difficult to map it and establish precise data. We have estimations or national reports of what China, South Africa, or Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia or Turkey, might be doing. There are also very active countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, which have a significant volume of South-South cooperation, but there are no regional records like we have in our Ibero-American region.

Which countries lead in South-South cooperation?

The six leading countries of the region are Brazil, which holds a prominent place, as well as Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Although, all Latin America countries have South-South cooperation projects, there is a strong concentration in these six countries, accounting for 90-92% of all projects.

Another interesting thing to see in these SEGIB reports is that all countries receive South-South cooperation, which is a very characteristic element and something to highlight because we’re talking about horizontal cooperation. With this type of cooperation, often one country has greater weight, more power, more resources or a higher degree of relative development in a theme, but both participating countries benefit and learn from that process. In other words, the benefit is mutual, and it’s not a donor-recipient relationship, as was traditionally established. In South-South cooperation, equality is not just an ideological position but also a reality; in practice, both countries benefit.

In addition, many countries can be very powerful but perhaps not have the same degree of relative development across the board. Therefore, many smaller countries can present opportunities for learning and benefits in areas that are very useful for other countries with a higher degree of relative development.

I think we are going to see a greater intensity in the future, even South-North cooperation, that is, countries in the South who start to provide advising, aid, cooperation and technical solutions to more developed countries.

Can you give us an example of successful South-South cooperation?

There are always some projects that are nicer and more interesting than others. Speaking of Latin American, there are three clearly-identified thematic blocks: the social area, with poverty-reduction, education, health or housing policies; the economic and agricultural development area; and lastly, the one related to the quality of institutions, governance, transparency, tax issues, and all the rest.

To give some examples of both extremes, in the social area, there is one underway in Brazil that we at SEGIB have particular affection for; it has to do with a network of 70 human milk banks in the region. In this network, women who produce more milk than they need for their own children donate this milk to children who aren’t getting enough to meet their nutritional needs, either because their mothers don’t produce enough milk or because they’re orphans.

A second example is a system of managing transplants in the Southern Cone, the region between Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. It’s a very sophisticated and highly technical system that works very well in this region.

Then there are a vast number of themes, for example, agricultural production, improving rice harvests at family farming level, and projects related to improving tax systems, the quality of public policies, training of civil servants, etc.

In other words, the breadth of projects has to do with the region’s capacities, but also with the region’s needs. The countries of the region often demand solutions that are applicable to their specific reality. That is, they don’t seek the best solution in the world, because if they did, every country would always look for cooperation from the Nordic countries, Germany, or countries that common sense tells us are much more developed.

Often we say: which are the countries that have recently developed a solution to the same problem I have but with the ability to make it successful? Sometimes one can have a fantastic solution, but later it can’t be used because it requires a great deal of resources and sophisticated technology. That famous international solution is of little use to me if it’s not applicable to my concrete reality because of my geographical characteristics, my language, my technological abilities, etc.

Very often, there are interesting cases of countries that one associates with a particular problem and, precisely because they have this problem, they have developed the ability to combat it.