10 Principles of Good Practices to Decolonize German and European Cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean
Research project: “Decolonizing German cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean (2025-2026)” (CLACSO)
With the support of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Germany
Research team: Karina A. Bidaseca (Project Leader) (Tricontinental South-South Program, CLACSO / University of Buenos Aires / CONICET, Argentina), Adriana Anacona (University of Valle, Colombia), Claudia Miranda (UNIRIO, Brazil) and Inés Castro Apreza (UNICACH, Mexico)
How can we identify best practices for decolonizing German and European cooperation? This project, led by Dr. Karina A. Bidaseca (South-South Programme Coordinator and researcher), draws on intersectional and decolonial feminist perspectives to identify and counter colonial continuities in development cooperation. It focuses on the experiences and perspectives of Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities and their women, with the aim of proposing decolonial cooperation practices.
Driven particularly by feminist, anti-racist and indigenous movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, the debate on the possibilities of decolonizing cooperation is booming.
Marked by the USAID crisis and its closure since July 1, 2025 – under the administration of Donald Trump – which highlights a global humanitarian crisis that disrupts vital aid in health and food security and reconfigures geopolitics by reducing the influence of the Global North, the possibility of a new paradigm emerges.
Our CLACSO project has fostered reflection from the territories of the Global South and promoted innovative research, collaborating with leaders of indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in the search for best practices to decolonize international cooperation from the Global North. “The body—its wounds and scars—becomes a living archive of colonial memory” (Bidaseca, 2026, p. 17).
The project, located in areas marked by structural and colonial violence, is based on the approach of “post-heroic feminist ethnographies,” which challenge the androcentric and colonial “heroism” of classical anthropology, proposing a subaltern and contextualized writing from the Global South. These collaborative methodologies, developed mainly by women, reconfigure the researcher-subject relationship through reflexivity, the ethics of care, and the incorporation of subaltern voices in conflict zones (Bidaseca, 2018, p. 120).
