Potential and Challenges for Emerging Development Partners: The Case of Indonesia

Emerging development partners can play an extremely important role in international cooperation, because they have accumulated valuable experience and knowledge in identifying and implementing their own development solutions. They have also overcome many of the same difficulties and constraints that other developing countries face. However, such experience and knowledge has hitherto not been effectively shared among countries of the South. For example, most development partners from the South have not yet established an articulated institutional framework to carry out such knowledge sharing with other countries. Valuable knowledge and technologies are often not well documented or still remain tacit, thereby constraining their smooth transfer to other countries. The objective of this paper is to gather insights into the potential and challenges in development cooperation for new development partners by drawing from a case study on Indonesia. Indonesia is a member of G20 and a pioneering emerging development partner that is mainstreaming knowledge-centered South-South cooperation. The ‘Indonesian model’ is found to be flexible and pragmatic, with a significant emphasis on technical cooperation, and without a strong regional or specific-country focus. The country’s experiences and its innovative use of South-South and triangular cooperation (SSTC) might be considered valuable for other emerging development partners looking for a modality of effective SSTC.