Objective/context:

This article focuses on explaining and describing the links between foreign policy and development cooperation, based on the identification and analysis of the different rationales2 that give meaning to the economic-cultural and political-technical agendas of South-South cooperation, instruments and motivations, and how these correspond to the geographical and sectorial allocations of transfer of concessional loans, subsidies and technical assistance in the cases of China, Brazil and India in Latin America and the Caribbean during the 2005-2015 period.

Methodology:

The comparative research was driven by a strategy involving “multiple embedded case studies”, supported by databases on transfers at geographical and sectorial level, constructed based on secondary sources and official and non-official databases.

Conclusions:

The main finding exposes that there are singularities detailed by the article in the case analysis. Nevertheless, the economic-cultural agendas channeled through development and economic-commercial banks, share the motivational axes of economic-business internationalization, the search for mutual commercial earnings, and infrastructure development; whereas the political-technical with ministries of commerce or of External relations -through the provision of subsidies and technical assistance-, peruse goals in specific thematic niches.

Originality:

Studies on the motivations of foreign aid have traditionally focused on a monolithic analysis of the States and they have not paid attention to the problem of duality in the management of development cooperation agendas. However, this article focuses on explaining the different cooperation agendas that emerge with States and, at the same time, on comparing different cooperating partners.