THE PERFORMANCE OF EMERGING MARKET COUNTRIES ON GOVERNANCE OF MULTILATERAL DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATIONS

THE EXPERIENCE OF SOME BRICS COUNTRIES

Abstract

In the early twenty-first century, a new multipolar world order emerges and international economic relations become more decentralized due to globalization and schemes of regional integration. In this backdrop, some so called emerging countries start to adopt a proactive economic diplomacy as an international insertion strategy, engaging in the formation of a multilateral governance opened to new actors. China went ahead with its exceptional performance in growth and economic scale, changing the status quo and foreshadowing changes in the directorate of advanced countries that has been governing the global economy since the 1970s. Other large countries and regional powers in their continents soon followed in the footsteps of China, such as India, Brazil, Russia and South Africa. The assemblage of these emerging countries under the acronym BRICS, despite its heterogeneity, makes them somehow a relevant geo-economic and geo-political grouping. Therefore, in order to support the redefinition of Brazil’s practice in the governance of multilateral development agencies, a comparative analysis of the respective strategies of participation of the other BRICS countries in the governance of such organizations is justified. This work proceeds to map the strategies followed by some members of BRICS in the governance of multilateral development agencies and tries to extract useful lessons for the formulation of a policy for the Brazilian government to guide its activities in such agencies in order to optimize the results of those actions, both as funds receiver and as shareholder of these institutions.