Foreword

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted economic and social vulnerabilities in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, a middle-income region undergoing a transition to development that still suffers from significant structural gaps and has been one of the hardest hit by this crisis in economic, social and health terms, with more than 1,350,000 deaths from the disease as of 26 July 2021.

Even as the countries of the region have begun to graduate from cooperation and official development assistance, persistent development traps can be identified in the areas of production, social inclusion, institutions and the environment. These factors are making it more difficult to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. In the new context of graduation, accordingly, it is vital for the cooperation agencies of countries traditionally understood as donors to adapt their cooperation strategies so as to maintain ties and continue working with countries that have recently graduated or are in the process of graduating and thereby maintain and strengthen partnerships and integration among all countries in pursuit of development, irrespective of income level.

A renewal of international cooperation is essential if more inclusive and sustainable development is to be attained for all the inhabitants of the region. In accordance with the concept of development in transition, elaborated by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean together with the European Commission and the Development Centre of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this cooperation should be tailored to the specific needs of countries and seek to address structural development gaps, contributing to the generation of regional and global public goods. It should be a multilateral, multilevel type of cooperation involving traditional and new actors (horizontal, regional, South-South, North-South, South-North and triangular cooperation) and working with an extensive toolkit that includes, among other things, financing instruments, climate change funds, blended finance, debt for environment swaps and domestic resource mobilization. This would support knowledge-sharing, capacity-building and delivery of the transfers needed to break development deadlocks.

Today, national and global challenges have largely converged, while the linkages between domestic policies and the global arena have continued to increase. In a changing and uncertain context, this document calls for debate and action on the processes whereby countries graduate from cooperation, calling into question the use of one-dimensional indicators such as per capita GDP to determine the scope

of cooperation and strategic partnerships in what is a complex, multidimensional process, and highlighting the need for more appropriate and effective instruments to guide international cooperation and determine resource allocation. A multidimensional vision based on the participation of all the actors concerned is the way to shift from processes of graduation to processes of gradation that enable a renewed form of international cooperation to attain its full potential.

Alicia Bárcena Executive Secretary Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC)