Rethinking Development Cooperation Working Group: Triangular Cooperation for Better Partnerships?

In early September, members of the Rethinking Development Cooperation (RDC) Working Group met in Cartagena, Colombia, for its third in-person meeting. The three-day seminar was held alongside APC Colombia’s South-South Cooperation Day and provided an opportunity to hone in on triangular cooperation; which is relatively unfamiliar to the group’s OECD Development Assistance Committee’s (DAC) providers, but highly-valued by non-DAC members. While the United Nations defines triangular cooperation as “southern-driven partnerships between two or more developing countries, supported by a developed country(ies) or multilateral organization(s), to implement development cooperation programmes and projects,” it was clear from the RDC’s discussion that there is no single partnership model for triangular cooperation.

In this blog, we summarize the RDC’s discussion on triangular cooperation partnerships, and draw out key lessons. We argue for investing in deeper understanding of current practice and evidence of impact to demonstrate its value in enabling development partnerships.

What is triangular cooperation and who engages in it?

While there is no single model for triangular—or “trilateral”—cooperation, the basic approach involves a partnership between three or more actors, with each taking on a different role:

1. The “beneficiary” partner is the project recipient, which requests support for a particular challenge;
2. The “pivotal” partner often has experience addressing specific issues in a context similar to the beneficiary, bringing knowledge, and human and/or financial resources to the project; 
3. The “facilitating” partner typically brings financial and technical resources to the project, and can play a role in connecting other partners.

A recent review of triangular cooperation projects reported to the OECD’s Triangular Cooperation Repository between 2000-2022, showed that Germany, Chile, Norway (via Norec), and Mexico were the countries most actively engaging in trilateral cooperation, while the UNDP was the most active international organization. The bulk of the projects reported (41 percent) were implemented in the Latin American and Caribbean region, and almost half (46 percent) included at least one non-state actor as part of the partnership (i.e. civil society, academia, private sector, etc.). While a key limitation of this dataset is that it relies on self-reporting so could miss partnerships not reported directly, it remains the best source available for mapping triangular cooperation engagements at the global level.

What are the benefits of the triangular model?

Our conversation revealed that for non-DAC members of the group, there were three main benefits to triangular cooperation:

1. Greater legitimacy through demand-driven and horizontal action
   A key value-add of triangular cooperation modalities is the ability to support more “legitimate” development action through promoting horizontal knowledge-sharing in direct response to the needs of beneficiary partners. The ability for triangular partnerships to bring together technical knowledge and financial resources from multiple actors allows beneficiaries to choose the best partners for their particular challenge and to leverage the comparative advantage of both DAC and non-DAC actors.

2. Cost-effective solutions to development challenges
   The principle of resource pooling that underlies triangular partnerships–where all partners contribute different skills, knowledge, and resources to the success of the project, based on their relative strengths–makes these partnerships an efficient modality for addressing development challenges. One non-DAC member also noted that regional knowledge and lower human resource costs relative to DAC members meant that projects could achieve greater “bang for their buck” by utilizing their capacity for implementation.

3. Strengthening relations between partners
   A key benefit of triangular cooperation is the ability to bring actors together on an equal footing to share responsibility, risk, and ownership over project outcomes. Unlike “vertical” North-South partnership, triangular cooperation builds on the strengths of each partner to support shared goals, providing a basis for building trusted partnerships which could extend beyond the project lifespan. Some suggested that triangular cooperation could allow non-DAC partners to maintain relations with DAC members as they transition from ODA-based relationships, providing a space for continued knowledge sharing and dialogue.

What are the challenges to triangular cooperation?

Despite such benefits, our conversations revealed that RDC DAC members were typically less familiar with triangular modalities, with most noting that their agencies did not participate to any substantial degree.

In part, the challenge was related to concern over a lack of evidence on the value-add of triangular cooperation. For instance, while triangular cooperation allows for cross-actor partnership, it also risks potentially higher transaction costs from engaging with additional actors and raises questions about the comparative efficiency and effectiveness of the modality over bilateral partnerships. Differences in how actors choose which projects to take on, including due to differing development priorities, as well as how targets and results are defined and measured, were seen as potential barriers to deeper engagement.

Nevertheless, across the DAC, multiple funds or calls for triangular cooperation proposals have been launched. This includes the European Union’s Adelante 2, which consists of six small-scale triangular cooperation funds established with Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Uruguay to implement projects in Latin America; Spain’s Triangular Cooperation Program for Latin America and the Caribbean; Portugal’s Triangular Cooperation Fund with Latin America and Portuguese-speaking African Countries, and Germany’s Fund for Triangular Cooperation with Asia. Going forward, a key question is how and whether these experiences can be meaningfully compiled and leveraged to provide better evidence on when, how, and why triangular cooperation may be worth pursuing more actively in the years ahead.

Is more triangular cooperation needed?

At the RDC, members agreed that the value of triangular cooperation, especially for building and maintaining partnerships across actors warranted additional exploration. More broadly however, the hopes of scaling-up triangular partnerships require better knowledge and understanding of its efficiencies, effectiveness, and potential risks to improve awareness of the opportunities that the modality could present.

Within the group, we hope to take the discussion forward, to further distill additional lessons and challenges from the experience of our members. Our latest CGD Podcast also discusses triangular cooperation with our colleague from APC Colombia.