BRICS Development Strategies: Exploring the Meaning of BRICS ‘Community’ and ‘Collective Action’ in the Context of BRICS State Led Cooperation in South Africa

The BRICS partnership has been portrayed in mainstream social media as an inter-state initiative that could challenge the geo-political hegemony of the Western bloc. Thus, far relatively little has been said about the prospect of extending the partnership to the level of ordinary citizens and how this might be achieved. A declared goal of BRICS, articulated in 2016, is that of “building responsive, inclusive collective solutions to core themes with a particular focus on institution-building, implementing past commitments and exploring innovative solutions to common issues”. This paper provides a preliminary assessment of the idea of “BRICS from below” might entail in policy terms by looking at how BRICS pronouncements have led to collective solutions, especially to economic development as it affects the local level, using South Africa as the case study site. The paper concludes that it appears the realities of the forms of engagement still resonate with more traditional forms of state led alliance building that are aimed less at transformation than at coordinating ‘national self-interest’. © 2017, Fudan University and Springer Science+Business Media Singapore.