Policy Ideas and North–South Research Cooperation: The Case of Norway

Introduction

The global landscape of North–South research cooperation is characterized by the agency of geopolitically powerful actors in Northern countries that have historically promoted themselves as the possessors and disseminators of legitimate knowledge. Funding agencies in countries linked to the global “North” have controlled the resources devoted to research programs and technical assistance focused on the global “South” and have established the terms of engagement (Cherry et al., 2018). Previous studies have unveiled the interests, foreign policy objectives, and ideologies that drive the engagement of different countries in sponsoring North–South research cooperation, usually under the rubric of international development assistance (Cherry & du Toit, 2018; Halvorsen & Nossum, 2017; Stokke 2005, 2019; Trilokekar, 2010).

The literature documents not only the pervasiveness of asymmetrical relationships in North–South research cooperation but also a growing recognition among policy and academic actors of these dynamics (Assie-Lumumba, 2006; Cherry et al., 2018; Halvorsen & Nossum, 2017; Jowi, 2009; Obamba & Mwema, 2009; Samoff & Carrol, 2004). Analysts note that partnership terminology has been increasingly co-opted by powerful actors over the last few decades (Cornwall, 2007), although Northern funders and experts continue to control the priorities and criteria used to fund and assess research. These criteria prioritize and privilege particular research themes, participant actors, research methodologies, and modes of cooperation. Hence, although there have been significant rhetorical shifts in discourse to emphasize demand-driven and context-sensitive research partnerships, these shifts have rarely been matched by substantive changes in practice (Bradley, 2007; Carbonnier & Kontinen, 2015; Cherry et al., 2018; Halvorsen & Nossum, 2017).

In this context, this article traces the creation of an approach to North–South cooperation that was envisaged as an alternative to the conventional models. The “South–South–North” partnership model was developed in Norway in the 1990s in an attempt to foreground the needs and priorities of researchers in the global South—even as their relationships were set within the inherently asymmetrical dynamics of development assistance programs. Norway presents a particularly interesting setting for this analysis, as it is among a number of “semi-core” or “semi-periphery” nations (Wallerstein, 1974) that have limited influence in the wider geopolitical arena, but that play a major role in the international development domain (Stokke, 2019). This group includes other Scandinavian countries and Canada, which have long supported academic partnerships and research cooperation through dedicated development-related agencies (Trilokekar, 2010; Weiler, 1984).

This study frames the analysis of the South–South–North partnership model using the conceptual lens of policy ideas. The South–South–North partnership model was designed within the Norwegian Program for Development, Research and Education (NUFU), which was a major policy initiative in Norway to support North–South research cooperation for over two decades (Nossum, 2017). Aspects of NUFU including the South–South–North model were incorporated in 2013 in a subsequent program under the aegis of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), which remains in operation. As a policy idea itself, the South–South–North model embeds beliefs about cause-and-effect relationships that have proved persistent over nearly three decades despite the programmatic changes at NORAD. This article foregrounds the ideational processes that made the adoption of this model possible in the Norwegian policy context as a source of its resilience, even as gaps between its goals and outcomes have become apparent.

Policy Ideas

Policy ideas, or shared beliefs, underlie policy actors’ understandings of what issues matter and how they should be addressed (Cairney, 2019). The conceptual lens of policy ideas is often used to illuminate the beliefs that underlie policy adoption, how policy problems are defined, and how certain solutions come to be seen as viable and appropriate. Research on the role of ideas in public policy brings to the forefront the social and cognitive aspects of policy processes, as it highlights how policy actors’ perceptions and interpretations of facts is mediated by ideas (Pal, 2014). Generally speaking, ideas are causal beliefs that help individuals make sense of reality and form their judgments on which policy issues matter, how they should be addressed, and why policy action is needed (Beland & Cox, 2010). Ideas are thus not treated as mere individual opinions, but rather shared beliefs that provide a “social glue” for political mobilization, the formation of coalitions, and the promotion of policy solutions. We draw from this literature to frame our case study of the South–South–North partnership model.

There are different levels of ideas; some are deeply held assumptions that are taken for granted and may go unarticulated, but underpin policy positions (Campbell, 2002; Hall, 1993). Those ideas may include broad worldviews that encapsulate understandings about the society, the economy, certain institutions, and the role of the State. Such ideas may function as public philosophies or as zeitgeist, which operate across policy fields (Mehta, 2011). They may only become explicit when contested and debated by other groups who do not share them, or espouse opposing perspectives. Also taking a comprehensive view, Hall (1993) defines policy paradigm as “a framework of ideas and standards that specifies not only the goals of policy and kind of instruments that can be used to attain them, but also the very nature of the problems they are meant to be addressing” (p. 279). Other ideas are very concrete and specific, such as defined policy solutions that policy actors espouse (e.g., “North–South partnerships for capacity building”). These ideas take the problems that they address and the objectives of employing them as self-evident (Mehta, 2011). Ideas may also be definitions for policy problems (e.g., “brain drain”). They provide an account of what the problems are and why they exist, which, in turn, influences the kinds of policy solutions that might be viewed as appropriate and desirable (Carney, 2019).

Method

This article reports on a case study of the South–South–North model, which represents a key case for its intrinsic features (Thomas, 2011). The purpose of our inquiry was instrumental (Stake, 1995) as we sought to unpack and explain the ideation of this innovative model of North–South research engagement. We draw from interviews carried out as part of a larger study of NUFU between 2010 and 2012 and from documentary data including a range of archival and contemporary sources. ¹ In-person interviews were conducted with 18 knowledgeable informants from policy and academic institutions who had direct experience with NUFU and held positions such as university faculty members, program officers, and agency administrators. Bibliographic and archival sources include a range of official government documents, program reports, and program evaluations produced by relevant agencies including the Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Higher Education (SIU) and NORAD. The analysis of these sources was focused on teasing out the origins and articulation of the South–South–North model, while situating them in their historical and political context.

The Policy Ideas Driving International Development in Norway

The development of a robust apparatus for development assistance forms the background of Norway’s role as a sponsor of North–South cooperation. During the post–Second World War ascent of developmentalist and modernist ideologies, Norway’s state institutions were characterized by low levels of transnational engagement (van der Veen, 2000). Due to the country’s geographic isolation, low population density, and its relative paucity of economic development until the discovery of North Sea oil in the 1960s, Norway had not historically been in a position to autonomously develop its foreign policy (Neumann, 2007; Pharo, 2003). During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Norway was involved in the United Nations’ development programs, specifically the UN Special Fund for Technical Assistance. However, its contributions were low compared with its European peers (van der Veen, 2000). Norway’s first foray into bilateral aid was through a fisheries project in Kerala, India, in 1952, with the single project actively debated in the national parliament for more than 2 years (Stokke, 2005). As international development became a more prominent global and national issue, a special committee was set up to review and expand the overall aid program. The report of the Onarheim Committee (1967) echoed the call for a centralized national organization, setting in motion a process that culminated in the establishment of NORAD in 1968.

The later third of the 20th century ushered in an era of economic prosperity and growing interest in issues of international governance. As a result, Norway’s increased involvement in official development assistance programs placed it as a top donor country in the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) by the 2000s (Stokke, 2019). Norway has undergone the most significant increase in development-related programming of any OECD nation (OECD, 2008). Underneath this increase in domestic funding is a powerful political subsystem that unites development aid and foreign policy interests, reconciling their competing agendas to foster development in the global South and to advance national self-interest (Tvedt, 2007). Three broad ideas have been influential in this policy domain, supporting government engagement with capacity building in less developed countries: humanitarianism, enlightened self-interest, and international reputation building.

North–South Research Cooperation

The NUFU, which operated between 1991 and 2012, has been widely credited as the source of cooperation models aimed at supporting genuine partnerships with academic actors from the South, and responding to the actual needs and demands of their local contexts (Nossum, 2017). The program represented a major policy initiative of the Norwegian government to build research capacity in higher education institutions from less developed countries. NUFU sought to accomplish that by supporting partnerships between Norwegian universities and their counterparts in the global South focused on research collaboration and graduate training. The roots of NUFU are in the creation of a standing committee under the Norwegian Council of Universities in 1987 with a mandate to strengthen and coordinate cooperation between Norwegian universities, colleges, and research institutions, and their counterparts in nations receiving Norwegian development-related funding and technical assistance. NUFU was subsequently operationalized in a formal agreement with the MFA in 1991 (SIU, 2004b). NUFU progressively expanded its activities as its funding increased, supporting a growing array of programs and projects.

NUFU’s creation and subsequent support for about two decades lied on its congruence with the ideas discussed above. As articulated in NUFU program reports, “the creation of NUFU in 1987 was couched in idealistic terms: Norwegian academics had a moral responsibility to support their colleagues in the South” (SIU, 2004b, p. 4), a rationale directly influenced by the humanitarian idea. Enlightened self-interest was also central to NUFU’s mandate of fostering long-term, mutually beneficial cooperation between Norwegian and Southern academic institutions based on “reciprocal and equal partnership” (SIU, 2004b, p. 5). Finally, NUFU’s public articulation of a unique approach to North–South cooperation based on bottom-up and demand-oriented projects was congruent with Norway’s reputation in the international development domain.

NUFU originated the idea of “South–South–North” cooperation, emphasizing the engagement of research partners in the South with significant autonomy and participation in decision-making. The model was based on having a primary Southern institution as the network lead involving a secondary Southern institution and a Norwegian partner. Both Norwegian and Southern research coordinators were expected to be active participants in project design—“a project proposal . . . should be planned and worked out jointly by the proposing researchers of the main cooperating institutions” (SIU, 2006a, p. 1; original emphasis). Institutional leaders were expected to be engaged in the proposal development for feedback to be given regarding the nature and scope of the proposed project as well.

The first evaluation stage comprises two processes: External reviewers were procured by the NUFU central administration, “one from the South and one from the North” to “assess the scientific quality of the proposals” (SIU, 2006a, p. 2). After these external reviews were complete, they were made available to the institutional leaders who prioritized a list of all applications from their own institutions based on the expert assessment (SIU, 2006a, p. 2). Experts and institutional leaders from both Southern and Northern jurisdictions were engaged in the vetting processes in an attempt to incorporate multiple interpretations of the potential impact and quality of individual research projects. Finally, the proposal rankings created by the administering officials at the participating Southern institution were given double weighting in the evaluation process carried out by the NUFU program board in an attempt to ensure that Norwegian interests did not dominate the selection of individual projects.

Annual progress reports were a joint responsibility of project coordinators in Norway and the foreign institutions and are supplemented by institutional reports presented annually by all participating institutions (SIU, 2009d, p. 7). NUFU argued that this provided “structural access to information, technology, professional networks, and publications channels within a framework of long-term and mutually beneficial relationships,” facets that are rare in mainstream bilateral research cooperation (SIU, 2009d, p. 8).

These features of the NUFU program were in direct contrast to traditional and widely criticized approaches to North–South programming based on hierarchical and asymmetrical terms (Halvorsen & Nossum, 2017; Samoff & Carrol, 2004). The context for the design of this model relates to one of the core mandates of the NUFU Program Board: to operationalize a decentralized model for cooperation and quality assurance in research partnerships between Norwegian and recipient higher education institutions (SIU, 1998). NUFU justified the adoption of a decentralized model for North–South engagement with four reasons: the lack of a substantial central bureaucracy; the promotion of ownership, integration, and commitment from the partner institutions to the cooperation both at the departmental and central levels; the promotion of knowledge build-up at recipient institutions; and the promotion of strengthened partnerships between academics and academic institutions in Norway and the partnering jurisdictions through joint initiation, implementation, and day-to-day running of the cooperation project (SIU, 1998, 2009d). Furthermore, a decentralized model was argued to allow for greater integration of recipient institutions and actors in the evaluative process, maximizing local input and recommendations, and investing actors in the South with significant authority over the project selection and evaluation processes (SIU, 1998).

Humanitarianism was central to the ideation of the South–South–North model. The ultimate expression of this logic was the aspiration, according to the NUFU administration, that “the needs and priorities of the institutions in developing countries take priority over those of Norwegian institutions” (SIU, 1998, p. 9). The South–South–North approach was formally incorporated into the NUFU structure during the second phase of the program, between 1996 and 2000. Over the course of the next two program phases (2002–2006 and 2007–2011), the proportion of projects following this model grew rapidly, from about 25% to 52% (SIU, 2009b). In 2003, South–South–North cooperation became an articulated goal in official NUFU documentation (SIU, 2004a). The project selection process was designed to allow researchers from the global South to take an equal or leading role in the proposal writing process. Two policy practitioners discuss the outcomes of funded projects with reference to the humanitarian logic:

I can’t say that I don’t think anything was a waste of money, simply because even if it didn’t attain the academic goals that perhaps the project application had set out, it would do something for the institutions involved and particularly for the people involved; it gave them at least a chance.

It is all about individuals, it is about persons who are giving the possibility to develop themselves and their institutions, and they need a long perspective to do this. But this person who can then be in charge, he will develop maybe further, he can also, like I have seen, go into public service or governmental service and be a person who can talk higher education and research in a government, for instance.

Enlightened self-interested underpinned NUFU’s approach of providing unrestricted, thematically open funding opportunities supporting demand-driven research activities and capacity building. The program was oriented toward supporting bottom-up cooperation, under the belief that connecting like-minded researchers in mutually beneficial research projects was key to supporting effective partnerships. As one policy informant explains, the major means of this occurring is by individuals leveraging their shared interests to build the most “authentic” partnerships possible. Annual progress reports were prepared jointly by project coordinators in Norway and the foreign institutions, and were supplemented by annual institutional reports produced by all participating institutions (SIU, 2009d). Two Norwegian program officers explained the reasoning behind promoting such partnerships based on linkages among Norwegian and Southern researchers:

They will create a South-South network of rectors traveling between universities and creating nothing . . . We’ve had delegations from universities all over the world here, and you receive them as high rank delegation, you take them around, and so on; very little comes out of it, and some of our departments, the most popular departments, like petroleum geology, the climate research centres, they say, “we are sick and tired of receiving delegations, we don’t get anything out of it.”

The motivation . . . is always where do I find interesting people, why should we go to Norway if we can go to Khartoum, Khasala, Port, Sudan, Malakale in Uganda, and Addis?

Our interviews demonstrate that throughout its history, NUFU administrators and researchers maintained political support through a persistent engagement with Norwegian politicians, external experts, and Southern stakeholders. NUFU made significant allowances to allow researchers to produce a variety of media whose “utility” and “value” may not coincide with mainstream academic norms or development paradigms. The idea of enlightened self-interested legitimated supporting research cooperation in those terms, as expected outcomes were not just short-term outputs from individual projects:

But I think that the basic idea has all the time been this, both sides, both the program should be and it should promote academic collaboration and it should always be something in it for both parts, but at the same time, it is of course development funds, it is also, the capacity building is a very, very important word . . . it’s also building up something which is weak that can be strengthened by this collaboration and then we’re talking about the South partners, of course, first and foremost. So the idea is that building capacity for research and research-based education is a way of making a country, or first of course the university, but then which can then contribute to its country’s . . . I would say more like help to self-help, or a way to sort of building something which can, building a research capacity, building expertise so that the country can be better equipped for sort of solving their own problems.

NUFU officials were keenly aware of how the program featured as an element of international distinction for Norway in the international development community. Two former administrators commented on how NUFU differed in goals and approaches:

When it started, the World Bank and the international agencies in general, talked about basic education. Higher education and research were not on their agenda because the idea was that these poor countries do not need their own research capacity; that can be obtained in England or the United States or wherever. In a way, forgetting that for a country to receive aid without having the capacity, intellectual, scientific capacity, to evaluate what they receive, is the same as saying you are completely at the dominance of outside powers, outside competence, outside decisions . . . This is why Norway has said for years that these countries need their own research capacity, both to build up internal research and to have the capacity to evaluate what they are offered.

You had this tradition and that the World Bank, in fact, gave this idea that investment in higher education was bad investment, the rate of return was very low, as you would know. So they said to all these countries that you should not invest in higher education. So I will say that the Norwegian engagement in higher education, especially in Africa and also other countries with poverty, was that we had, even though this is small money, but we had a principle, an idea . . . that these countries need their own higher education institutions and even research capacity to be able to participate in the new global society. So whether the World Bank stopped or had the idea that you should not bother because we will provide you with knowledge, international knowledge, because we can give it to you, we had the idea that they should make their own capacity. So the NUFU Program . . . was a radical idea at the time and kept to these principles.

The Decoupling of the South–South–North Idea and Practice

There was, however, an evident decoupling of program structures and organization from the higher level ideas inspiring them. From its creation, NUFU publicly embraced a strong version of equal partnerships that prioritized the needs and interests of less developed countries. However, evaluations consistently found that the program failed to bring these programmatic ideas to practice. One commissioned evaluation to an arm-length agency concluded that “The decision-making process in the NUFU program is not transparent and is largely controlled by the Norwegian institutions. The Southern partners have no insight or say in project selection or fund allocations” (Norwegian MFA, 2000, p. 8; emphasis added). This critical conclusion was attributed to a gap between the overarching aims and rationales, on one hand, and the actual organizational and governance procedures adopted by NUFU:

The involvement of the South in decision-making is virtually non-existent, a point already raised in the 1994 evaluation report. Despite the fact that most interviewees agree that the South should play a more substantive role in the decision-making process, and despite the fact that the participants in the Cape Town seminar recommended that [Southern universities’] priorities should be put before the Committee to enable fair decision-making in project selection, to date no measures have been taken to implement this longstanding intention and recommendation. (Norwegian MFA, 2000, p. 28)

Another source of strain were multilayered decision-making structures involving different agencies that had different and sometimes competing priorities (NORAD, the MFA, the Ministry of Education and Research). Over the course of NUFU’s history, most of its funding was provided by NORAD, where it eventually was moved administratively (SIU, 2009d), whereas other agencies remained involved in different capacities. This was poignantly articulated in another major external evaluation of the NUFU program during its last funding cycle:

Each player in the network has its own agenda: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs may have their programmatic and strategic objectives closer linked to broader knowledge creation objectives, related to the Norwegian policy of taking full advantage of the globalization process. NORAD, with its aid history, background and administrative culture may have a much tighter aid perspective on the funds transferred to . . . NUFU . . . While the Ministry of Education and Research is the main provider of the universities’ budgets, it has no funds of its own intended for aid, development or capacity building in the South, nor any related expertise . . . Attempts at aligning the different—and often conflicting—agendas of the many players are rare, perhaps because it is not clear who holds the responsibility to create a better alignment. (COWI AS, 2009, p. 33)

Over time, both the MFA and NORAD increasingly bypassed traditional governance processes to unilaterally establish North–South cooperation programs that paralleled NUFU. In 2012 to 2013, NORAD eventually transitioned its work with higher education in the global South to NORHED, emphasizing capacity building in higher education institutions, acknowledging NUFU’s failure to promote more symmetrical research cooperation with partners in the global South (NORAD, 2015). Our interviewees indicate that by its last few years, the changing political context had begun to take a toll on the program’s administration and on the willingness of Norwegian academics to participate. This is consistent with Skinningsrud and Brock-Utne (2016) claim that a growing emphasis on new public management principles brought a shift away from NUFU’s decentralized and bottom-up approaches and toward a stronger role for NORAD administrators in setting the agenda and ensuring the delivery of preestablished outcomes. This highlights the gap between the ideas embedded in the design of the South–South–North model—of moving beyond asymmetrical, donor-led North–South research cooperation by supporting new partnership setups—and the broader power dynamics and organizational interests shaping its operation.

Conclusion

This study analyzed the origins of NUFU’s South–South–North partnership model using the conceptual lens of policy ideas. Much of the literature on North–South research cooperation highlights the gaps between the official rhetoric of Northern agencies and programs and the reality on the ground (Carbonnier & Kontinen, 2015; Cherry et al., 2018; Cornwall, 2007; Halvorsen & Nossum, 2017; Koch and Weingart, 2016). From the vantage point of ideational analysis, the articulation of certain shared beliefs around relevant policy problems and the most suitable solutions to address them are an inherent feature of the politics that leads to the creation of research cooperation programs. By identifying the ideas that shaped the development of NUFU’s programming, our study illuminates how policy actors in Norway conceived of their role in North–South research engagement not as part of a Northern “mainstream,” but as an alternative actor with a distinctive outlook.

We identified the broad ideas that shaped NUFU’s creation of the South–South–North partnership model. The ideas of humanitarianism, enlightened self-interest, and international reputation building are akin to public philosophies (Mehta, 2011) as they are about the purpose of government and public policy, being applicable across policy fields. To the extent that this kind of ideas become taken for granted, policy actors will take them up as natural ways of articulating policy issues and solutions. In the Norwegian context that gave rise and sustained NUFU for more than two decades, engagement with the global South was viewed as a legitimate course of action for government policy that counted on significant political support (Tvedt, 2007). The acceptance of the appropriateness of this type of engagement prevented questioning of the adequacy or desirability of the adoption of South–South–North partnership model. By focusing on teasing out its constitutive ideas, we foregrounded the socially embedded rationales that justify and legitimize this specific programmatic idea.

At this ideational level, Norway’s participation in North–South research cooperation as a sponsor was justified as involving normative (humanitarianism) and causal beliefs about the positive effects of Norway’s policy action toward less developed countries (enlightened self-interest and international reputation). In this way, government support of the development of NUFU in the 1990s followed more general beliefs about the role of the Norwegian government and public policy in the international arena. As a nation situated in the global periphery up until the early 1960s, Norway’s creation of NUFU in the 1990s represented a significant shift in its position in North–South research cooperation. This relatively rapid change of status speaks to one of the weaknesses of the North–South framing that homogenize countries with varying developmental trajectories into a simplistic dichotomy. Through NUFU and subsequent initiatives, Norway became a player in the North–South research cooperation landscape, although aspirations to differentiate itself from the Northern mainstream proved hard to materialize in practice as evidenced by the case of the South–South–North model.