Next week, China will host the 9th Brics Summit in Xiamen in Fujian Province. Like the Brics-Bimstec Outreach Summit held in Goa in 2016, China organised a massive pre-summit pulse-testing conference on the critical issue of governance; representatives of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (Brics), and immediate neighbouring countries attended the conference, which was held in Quanzhou. These deliberations culminated in China emerging as a core actor and a pivot in the cross-regional and inter-continental game of new regionalism dynamics. After a decade of interactions at various levels, the Brics countries are now forging a “strategic partnership” as highlighted in both the 2015 Ufa Declaration and the 2016 Goa Declaration. President Xi Jinping’s letters from 1st January 2017 to his counterparts in Brics provides a clear agenda for the Xiamen Summit, where the leaders are likely to draw a blueprint entitled “Brics: Stronger Partnership for a Brighter Future”.  India’s increasing proximity to the Japan-US axis and the resultant growing palpitations could in fact be inconsistent with Brics countries’ advocacy of “common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security to act in coordination and render each other support”.

However, India could use the Brics forum as a major anti-terrorism platform, and the meetings of national security advisers and the working group on counter terrorism to its advantage. The forthcoming Xiamen Summit could in fact be a precursor to expedited adoption of the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism in the UN General Assembly. India’s Foreign Affairs Minister VK Singh, while addressing his Brics counterparts in Beijing last June, emphatically stated that “terrorists cannot be differentiated as good or bad. They are terrorists, they are criminals and we need to have concerted actions both regionally and internationally to curb their activities.”

New world order

Besides being gradually seen as a substantive block to push the agenda of the Paris Agreement on climate change, there are moves wherein Brics could replace the now virtually defunct Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) as a more effective forum for South-South Cooperation. Declaration in the Brics Goa Summit in 2016 calling upon “developed countries to honour their Official Development Assistance commitments to achieve 0.7 percent of Gross National Income commitment for Official Development Assistance to developing countries,” reiterated what NAM and G-77 countries strove for throughout the 1970s and 1980s. 

New Development Bank (NDB) set up by the Brics with $100 billion in 2014, and Contingent Reserve Arrangements (CRA) are aimed at supporting infrastructure construction projects and are also looking for new growth points for global economy. The NDB, along with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), are fervently aiming to bring in a new regime of global financial architecture, and drastically cut down the roles of the Bretton Woods triggered World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). This was reiterated by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi after the Goa summit in October 2016, “We spoke in one voice of our resolve to promote the reform of the global financial and economic architecture, and expand the role of emerging and developing economies in the IMF.” It is quite likely that the Xiamen summit would emphatically urge the IMF to complete the 15th general review of quotas on time, expand and strengthen the role of Special Drawing Rights, and push forward for the World Bank voting share review.

However, during a decade of its existence, other than in a few areas, Brics also do not have anything substantive and tangible to show. In fact, during the Brics Policy Planning Dialogue held in Patna in July 2016, two crucial instruments among the five-pronged approach adopted were “institution building to further deepen and sustain Brics cooperation” and “implementation of the decisions of previous Summits”. This clearly indicates that Brics too could be a laggard like Saarc in terms of tangible performance and a forerunner in terms of rhetoric and promises. The Goa Summit 2016 theme, “Building Responsive, Inclusive and Collective Solutions”, could in fact just remain as an unpractised ethos.

Knowledge pool

Education as a critical theme of cooperation among the Brics members could be a game changer. Besides the activities of Brics Think Tank Council and Brics Academic Forum, there have been three major initiatives in last few years viz., regular meetings of the Brics Ministers of Education and delineation of broad principles of Brics Network University (NU) and actions by Brics University League (UL).  Besides taking the Sustainable Development Goal 4, related to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’, as a national priority, Brics partners have already identified areas like sharing of macro-data, identifying best practices, applying Information and Communications Technology (ICT) on a much deeper and larger scale, focusing on skills and innovations, and facilitation of mobility of students and teachers as core areas of cooperation.

However, given the physical distance of the members (spanning across four continents), geographical contrasts, politico-historical evolution of member states, relative development status and the governance structures and institutional variations, the Brics member countries have to increasingly adopt non-conventional techniques and practices to initiate and deepen cooperation practices. This is much called for, as Brics, as a cooperation conglomerate, defies the traditional logic and rationale of contiguous geography based regionalism and integration. The very absence of ‘regionness’ makes this grouping both unique and formidably challenging.

Taking education as a core theme, the existing bilateral cooperation endeavours among the Brics member countries have to be gradually transformed into five-country level actions. This is a traditionally available track. On the other hand, the educational institutions at the sub-national geography level within member countries with common socio-cultural, topographical-demographic and bio-diversity-ecological features could be brought to a common five-country level platform. This will be a sharp but rewarding deviation from orthodox framework.

For instance, the mountain regions in the Brics countries could identify the crucial inter-disciplinary themes like climate change impact, bio-diversity conservation, innovations and technology, agricultural heritage, cross border trade and economic corridors, traditional medicinal system and IPR, human security and management of natural resources and trans-border environmental injuries. They could develop institutional networking across the member countries on a sub-national framework. All these fit well into the Brics NU knowledge field priority, and also could be aligned with the broader activities of Brics like the Memorandum of Understanding for Establishment of Brics Agricultural Research Platform signed in Goa in 2016.

Unlike the orthodox Brasilia-Moscow-Delhi-China-Pretoria based cooperation axis, this sub-national mountain system centric approach would fast track the process of sharing educational resources, collaborative research, new knowledge generation and also mobility of students and scholars and exchange of teaching and research faculty.  This would lessen the huge burden of practicing unfocused and target-less cooperation at the national level and would make the cooperation people-centric rather than nation-centric. A critical pool of experts and professionals could thus be generated across countries on the basis of common geography and critical themes.  The Brics members could identify other such ecological zones, themes and institutions and work out the modalities effectively. This is where the Brics Network University could make a huge difference by inter-connecting and aligning institutions, developing a compatible enabling framework of exchanges, and recognising degrees.

Lama is High End Expert in Sichuan University, China and was a member of the Indian team at the BRICS Meeting held in Quanzhou, Fujian, China held in August 2017