Supporting the transition from ‘beneficiary’ to ‘pivotal’ role in South-South Triangular Cooperation: A case study of an agricultural-research-for-development project

South-South Triangular Cooperation (SSTC) is increasingly gaining traction as an international development approach, providing an intermediate modality between North-South and South-South Cooperation approaches. Successful implementation of SSTC-based approaches requires former beneficiary partners to transition to the role of pivotal partners. Based on our own experience with an agricultural-research-for-development (AR4D) project involving Cambodia, Indonesia and Australia as the beneficiary, pivotal and facilitating partners respectively, we evaluated the needs to support the role of change of a former beneficiary partner (in this case, Indonesia) to take on the pivotal role in an SSTC modality. Our findings indicate that successful transition from the beneficiary to pivotal partner role requires substantial temporal and financial investment by both the pivotal and facilitating partners, and we list specific recommendations in relation to design, actor and context conditions. We conclude that, in addition to changes to project design and implementation, establishing institutional frameworks and systems to smoothly share knowledge and experience is an important next step in successfully adopting and scaling out SSTC approaches to AR4D projects, and that agencies involved in such projects should explicitly adapt their existing development and implementation approaches to incorporate these recommendations.