ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the connections between foreign policy and the provision of development assistance. It focuses on a specific mechanism of development assistance: technical cooperation, i.e., essentially the transfer of knowledge from one State to another. The Realist approach brings strong explanatory power to Brazil's reasoning over specific choices in providing development assistance. Practically all interviewees interpreted Brazil's no-strings-attached technical cooperation agreements as instruments of soft power, given under the expectation of generating positive externalities. The analysis of technical cooperation agreements needs to be attentive to volume and time: while one single agreement is likely to produce very little immediate significance, a collection of agreements in a mid/long timeframe is certainly capable of producing meaningful impacts. The empirical analysis of Brazil's provision of technical cooperation provides an opportunity to expand the existing literature on this country's foreign policy, whether by offering novel data and ideas or comparing the present findings with other authors' previous material.
