The Portuguese brand in international cooperation
Only recently I started in Portuguese cooperation for development, which is one of the pillars of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I do it circumstantially, through my University and limited to the area of health, ignoring what is happening in other areas of intervention, the intricacies, the problems and how the future of cooperation is thought.
Under the ground policy of Instituto Camões, which coordinates the country’s policy on the domain, experience on the ground and the respect that Portugal has towards local people and institutions, international agencies and other countries with cooperation missions. I also experienced the motivation, preparation and awareness of the responsibility of the people who give Camões a face. Portugal in its own right a unique place in the PALOP and in Timor-Leste.
Cooperation for the significant development of development and the development of actions for the sustainable development of human rights and by the State of third countries. Something for naive and romantic, some will think.
Only those for whom the supremacy of cultures is thought of, for whom isolationism represents an international defense solution, or for whom the international order is conquered through trafficking, war or interference in other institutions.
Few imagined that 60 years after the milestones ushered in international cooperation, an idea of a new one between nations would perhaps remain unfulfilled. In truth, geopolitics and geoeconomics have stagnated in what was once understood as a transitional phase. They stagnated the just vision of the world, they were not able to supplant the colonial and imperial visions, other dominant ones that, from both sides, continue to guide agreements and policies.
In each conflict and in each interference, the stagnation is renewed that keeps us guaranteed of an international order like the “4 c”: cooperation, communication, collaboration and connectivity. We are left with the state that we know so well of permanent latency of presence in the international market.
What is at stake is the typical example, perhaps the most important of all, of the mismatch between Politics (politics) and policies (policies). As for the Policy, the defense of well-being and sustainability for all and without exception inscribed in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) gathers a broad discursive consensus. The problem lies in making national policies implement this discourse. As I have shown, I believe that we are also on an uncertain path and far from achieving the SDG targets by 2030, but not only, due to Covid-19.
I underline the rigor of the meaning of cooperation for development that I explained above. Cooperating doesn’t mean helping others, it goes beyond that. Cooperate to have a meaningful sense of the idea that those have in a place so comfortable that they have an obligation to support or support the idea. Cooperating means much more than friendship.
Cooperating means having an understanding of global health: that countries live in an interdependence that makes the well-being of some dependent on the well-being of others; that there are neither privileged nor unprotected, because there are self-sufficient places immune to geopolitics and geoeconomy; that the causes and solutions of well-being and health problems are found on a transnational scale. Basically, it means that problems are common and that solutions depend on the collective. The Covid-19 pandemic gives visibility to all this.
And it is through this understanding of global health that the sustainable development of One of the Sustainable Health Goals will be possible.
Fulfilling its role, of course. But not only are there some examples of how Portugal’s development needs to be deepened towards the north in many countries of the world, but cooperation can also make more links without adequate development with the sustainable world.