Funding of research agendas about the global south in Latin America and the Caribbean: lexicometric and content analysis in Latin American scientific production

ABSTRACT

The Global South has increasingly become a recurring research agenda, often originating in the Global North. There is a need to understand what these research agendas consist of and what role Latin America and the Caribbean play in defining and/or reproducing them. The purpose of this study is to understand the agendas of the Global South supported by northern agencies, based on a methodological proposal that combines lexicometric analysis of abstracts, grant data-based content analysis on scientific production, and funding data. The study identified four central agendas in the literature: (1) State role and the strength of non-western countries cooperation; (2) Decolonial research, citizen, and feminist perspectives; (3) Academic Collaboration and Education in circuits of science production and (4) Developmentalism in underdeveloped Global South countries. We identified different types of northern organizations, such as non-departmental public bodies, philanthropic and charitable foundations, guiding an agenda based on precariousness, poverty, and underdevelopment, while Latin America and the Caribbean reinforce an agenda taking the South as an example that can be applied in the North. We highlight an emergence of a multipolar world and the need to strengthen research in Latin America and the Caribbean in this context.

RESUMEN

O Sul Global se tornou cada vez mais uma agenda de pesquisa recorrente, frequentemente originária do Norte Global. No entanto, é necessário entender no que consistem essas agendas de pesquisa e qual é o papel da América Latina e do Caribe em defini–la e/ou reproduzi–la. O objetivo deste estudo é entender as agendas do Sul Global apoiadas por agências do norte, com base em uma proposta metodológica que combina análise lexicométrica de resumos, análise de conteúdo baseada em dados de concessão em produção científica e dados de financiamento. O estudo identificou quatro agendas centrais na literatura: (1) Papel do Estado e a força da cooperação em países não ocidentais; (2) Pesquisa decolonial, perspectiva cidadã e feminista; (3) Colaboração acadêmica e educação em circuitos de produção científica e (4) Desenvolvimentismo em países subdesenvolvidos do Sul Global. Por outro lado, identificamos diferentes tipos de organizações do Norte, como órgãos públicos não departamentais, fundações filantrópicas e de caridade, orientando uma agenda baseada em precariedade, pobreza e subdesenvolvimento, enquanto a América Latina e o Caribe reforçam uma agenda tomando o Sul como um exemplo que pode ser aplicado no Norte. No entanto, destacou–se a emergência do mundo multipolar e a necessidade de fortalecer a pesquisa na América Latina e no Caribe nesse contexto.

RESUMO

El Sur Global se ha convertido cada vez más en una agenda recurrente de investigación, a menudo originada en el Norte Global. Es necesario entender en qué consisten estas agendas de investigación y qué papel desempeñan América Latina y el Caribe en su definición y/o reproducción. El objetivo de este estudio es comprender las agendas del Sur Global respaldadas por agencias del Norte, basándose en una propuesta metodológica que combina análisis lexicométricos de resúmenes, análisis de contenido basado en datos de subvenciones sobre producción científica y datos de financiación. El estudio identificó cuatro agendas centrales en la literatura: (1) Rol del Estado y la fuerza de la cooperación de países no occidentales; (2) Investigación decolonial, perspectivas ciudadanas y feministas; (3) Colaboración académica y educación en circuitos de producción científica y (4) Desarrollismo en países del Sur Global subdesarrollados. Por otro lado, identificamos diferentes tipos de organizaciones del Norte, como organismos públicos no departamentales, fundaciones filantrópicas y benéficas, guiando una agenda basada en la precariedad, la pobreza y el subdesarrollo, mientras que América Latina y el Caribe refuerzan una agenda tomando al Sur como ejemplo que puede ser aplicado en el Norte. Se destacó una emergencia del mundo multipolar y la necesidad de fortalecer la investigación en América Latina y el Caribe en este contexto.

KEYWORDS:

• Global south
• research agendas
• lexicometric analysis
• content analysis
• funding

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:

• Sul Global
• agendas de pesquisa
• análise lexicométrica
• análise de conteúdo
• financiamento

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Sur Global
• agendas de investigación
• análisis lexicométrico
• análisis de contenido
• financiación

1. Introduction

The world underwent major political and economic transformations in the 1990s, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crisis of socialism in Eastern Europe, and China’s economic opening. Consequently, the classification of the world, based on the division between First, Second and Third World, required a revision. With the political and economic opening of a number of socialist countries, nations classified as Third World began to be referred to as Global South.

It was in this period that a globalized neoliberal agenda was implemented by the United States (Panizza 2009; Ibarra 2011; Bresser-Pereira and Theuer 2012; Albuquerque and Lycarião 2018). Known as the Washington Consensus, this agenda was implemented by U.S. financial institutions and was comprised of a set of economic policies imposed on developing countries, particularly Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). This neoliberal agenda has expanded through different spheres, including educational and scientific, especially through scientific policy instruments for passive internationalization (Lima and Maranhao 2009). It is also marked by the predominance, in scientific production spaces, of definitions of evaluation indicators, and the importation of ideas, epistemologies, methodologies, and technologies from central countries, as an inherent part of the countries’ scientific culture.

The control of informational flows of scientific communication under the domain of central countries can be understood as a neocolonial characteristic of science (Boshoff 2009). Nevertheless, in some territories in the South, marked by profound changes in their social, political, and cultural structures, colonialism has always been present, affecting the manner in which societies see and define asymmetric policies for minority ethnicities and social classes, considered by the elite as subaltern. In this sense, these colonial practices in the Global South should be seen as a recolonial, continuous, cyclical, and repetitive process in which colonial practices never really ceased to exist. This recolonial character of science is thus marked by the indirect dominance of science circulation spaces, particularly in the oligopoly of the scientific publishing market (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015; Albuquerque and de Oliveira 2021) for the definition of research agendas. This dependence, however, has been challenged and criticized by various initiatives and epistemological positions, including the production of epistemologies of the South.

Since the beginning of the century, and with greater emphasis after the second decade of the 2000s, we have observed the growth of research, calls, special editions, and academic events on the Global South in scientific circuits. Alongside calls for a De-Westernization of fields of knowledge, studies of the Global South have become a global research agenda worldwide (Ganter and Ortega 2019; Waisbord and Mellado 2014). There has also been an increase in interest in showing the inequalities in the circulation of scientific production from the South on a global scale (Peter and Estrada 2014). In scientific production circuits, this has been shown through studies on the presence in spaces of excellent scientific production (Vessuri, Guédon, and Cetto 2014; Demeter 2021), in patents (Seymore 2015), in altmetric mentions (Barata 2019; Spatti et al. 2021), editorial boards (Albuquerque et al. 2020; Goyanes 2019), syllabi, and participation in conferences, among others. Presence and prevalence, as analytical categories, have been crucial for revealing the inequality of global scientific circulation. In this aspect, Latin America and the Caribbean, given their geographic relevance to Southern Studies, have been central to this agenda, particularly in light of a multipolar shift in the world (Mori 2020).

A number of studies (Beigel 2013, 2016, 2019; Vessuri, Guédon, and Cetto 2014; Donelli and Gonzalez-Levaggi 2016; Ganter and Ortega 2019, among others) have sought to understand how global research agendas are inserted into national circuits, funding and research grants in certain fields of knowledge, the uneven nature of “international” publication, and the impact on national communities given the prevalence of central countries in circuits of science publication. Research agendas, especially those presented as a global hot research agenda (Neves and Lima 2012), are impacted by power disputes over the domain of scientific information. Those who define the research agendas, i.e. those that highlight the precedence of a certain approach or a certain topic, end up also defining the hierarchy of science by the possibility of becoming a reference on the subject (Merton 1973; Neves and Lima 2012). Through scholarships, citation capital, and mastery of circuits of international excellence, these research agendas also begin to define what topics and how they should be published in circuits of excellence and scientific prestige. Therefore, understanding research agendas that fall within the fields of knowledge requires a multidimensional look at scientific production, such as national and international scholarships (Ai and Masood 2021), funding agencies (Araújo and Appel 2021), topic predominance (Taise Hoffmann, Bisset Alvarez, and Martí-Lahera 2020; Oliveira, Barata, and Uribe-Tirado 2021), and the predominance of languages (Suzina 2021), cooperation networks (Olmeda-Gómez, Perianes-Rodríguez, & Ovalle-Perandones 2008), and bibliometric indicators (Chabowski, Samiee, and Hult 2013; Netto and Tello-Gamarra 2020), among others. Through approaches with a combination of different methods, it is possible to understand aspects of how these research agendas are inserted and gain capital in the production circuits of Science, Technology, and Innovation.

We are interested, however, in understanding what these agendas about the Global South are. Who are the stakeholders that are interested in funding the research agenda on the Global South in LAC and what approaches are latent in this construction of knowledge of the South? How does this agenda unfold in LAC and what are the most prevalent conceptual topics in this geopolitical region?

Faced with this set of questions, this research adopts a multi-method approach, through a mixed methodology, combining a Lexicometric Analysis of the abstracts of articles which used the words “Global South” in titles or abstracts, published in peer-reviewed journals, and Content Analysis of funded projects about Global South Studies, with the aim of understanding which agendas of research are being built in Latin America and the Caribbean. This research provides an analysis of Latin American publications containing the terms “Global South,” which aims to understand the Global South Agendas built in the region.

2. The Global South: from analytical category to fertile ground for implementing agendas

The Global South can be understood as a critical concept based on three understandings in which subjugation to the logics of capitalism is a defining analytical category, based on the distinction with the Global North (Mahler 2017): (1) as a resistant transnational imagined space that stems from a shared experience of subjugation under contemporary global capitalism and which allows for a mutual recognition between economically disadvantaged countries regarding their shared conditions; (2) a de-territorialized geography of the externalities of capitalism that encompasses the subjugation of peoples within the borders of the wealthiest countries, including proposals for declassifying the world (García-Gutiérrez 2014); and (3) a geographical definition traditionally used within intergovernmental development organizations to refer to economically disadvantaged nation-states (Dados and Connell 2012).

Despite being a term that became more widely used as a substitute for the term “Third World” after the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the first mentions of the concept of the Global South dates back to the 1970s. In 1974, Ralph Pettman reported tensions and conflicts in Australia’s foreign policy. Faced with an increase in poverty worldwide, Pettman points out that “the underdevelopment of the global south and the overdevelopment of the global north are two sides of the same historically structured coin” (1974, 310). Contesting the linear model of development, he argues that instead of fixing its first priorities on the eradication of poverty, developmentalism fails to build an explicit policy of distribution of wealth. In his words,

what this model ignores is the fact that the world comes replete with a twin imperia, a system of integrated dependencies that divides manufacturing, industrialized, established states from their submerged Third World hinterland. It is hardly surprising that a war on poverty waged by Western nations should be realized in practice as a war on the poor. (Pettman 1974, 311)

Since then, the term has been timidly presented in the literature, while still generating repercussions in academia. There were those who still defended a potential market to be explored in the South (Hayes 1975), while others criticized the concept for presenting a view that tended to homogenize countries, ignoring their local differences and incentiving industrialization without development: Hytten, Marchioni, 1970.

In the beginning of the 1990s, the concept of the Global South emerged as a means of examining dependency relationships, with a focus on how economic crises in Latin America and the Caribbean affect the United States and Europe (Reynolds 1992). In this period, a globalized neoliberal agenda was imposed by the United States, known as the Washington Consensus, consisting of a set of economic policies imposed on debtor countries by U.S. financial institutions, which expanded into various spheres, including educational and scientific (Albuquerque and Lycarião 2018). These economically demarcated understandings arose following the fall of the Berlin Wall and, subsequently, the sudden crisis of socialism in Eastern Europe and the economic opening in China. In a post-1990s context, the world faced the hegemony of capitalism as the predominant global economic system. Since then, the division between First, Second, and Third World has no longer made sense for a global classification. Such a definition “no longer had theoretical or operational consistency, as the Second World (socialist) countries were converting into ‘Market Democracies’” (Visentini 2015, 7). In turn, nations that would have been classified as Third World began later being referred to as the Global South. In this context, the dichotomous classification between North and South represents in itself a depoliticization of the world classification, reinforcing the idea that there is an abyssal division (Santos 2007) between the developed and underdevelopment, colonizers and the colonized. In the economic context of post-1990s globalization, the Global South became an important economic agenda item under the siege of neoliberal structural adjustment programs by the World Bank (Anievas and Matin 2016).

In this sense, the concept of the Global South has been brought to the scientific field in dispute. Already strained by the definition of semi-periphery (Wallerstein 2015), which showed its exhaustion as an analytical category for the understanding of global governance (Strange 1987), the Global South was a concept that initially made it possible to analyze dependency relationships regarding how economic crises in certain regions, such as Latin America and the Caribbean, impact the United States and Europe (Reynolds 1992). Shortly thereafter, the Global South came to be understood as a gathering of connected histories, sociologies, and epistemologies (Subrahmanyam 1997; Bhambra 2007). Gradually, the Global South came to be understood as a form of resistance to colonialism, capitalism, and global social inequalities and injustices (Prashad 2014). The concept of the Global South made it possible to thematize borders as a structural in-between that urges resistance to the logics of modernity, but which comprises “a fertile soil for those who wish to implement organizational, ideological or technological changes that promote a transformation” (Chase-Dunn and Hall 2016, 16).

As scientific activity becomes increasingly globalized and crucial to the global competitiveness of nations, interest in national and international comparisons of patterns of circulation of scientific production in different countries and regions has also grown (Bornmann et al. 2011). In calls for de-Westernization and in the search to show inequalities in the circulation of knowledge in scientific production circuits, the Global South has been presented as an analytical category to allow comparisons between developed and developing countries. It is also built under the imaginary that subaltern peoples recognize each other and share discourses of resistance in the face of advances in globalization (López 2007). Other agendas are associated with the so-called de-Westernization of science, such as Epistemologies of the South (Sousa Santos 2015), Decolonial Thought (Mignolo 2017), Subaltern Studies (Guha and Spivak 1982), center–periphery relations in the theory of dependency by Prebisch (2016) or economic perspectives, framed in terms of such concepts as developing countries or third world. Despite that, we argue the Global South Agenda is used as a key term to presuppose a unity in such a diverse place which is being constructed through a colonial narrative of commonly recognized features that reinforces the idea that the South is economically underdeveloped, environmentally polluted, culturally exotic, epistemologically dependent, and faces a democratic crisis. It is in this sense that it becomes important to look at the Global South Agenda in its essence, to understand which scientific narratives are linked to the key concept.

3. Internationalization, circulation of knowledge, and CTI circuits

In international cooperation studies, North–South, South–South, and triangular are categories of cooperation that are commony used (Modi 2011; Piefer 2014). Scholars have debated the effectiveness and investment aspects of international cooperation between developing and under-developed countries (Mawdsley, Fourie, and Nauta 2019). The emergence of the Global South in the past decades has brought about significant changes in development ideas, practices, norms, and actors, which involve the transfer or exchange of resources, technologies, and knowledge among countries that were previously considered part of the “Third World.” While there are differences in emphasis and approach among regional and institutional groupings, actors involved in South–South Cooperation often draw on shared colonial and postcolonial experiences and promote the collective strength of the South in relation to the North. This has sparked a whole sub-field of development studies where the uniqueness, desirability, and emancipatory potential of Development International Cooperation are fervently debated by scholars (Vieira and Alden 2011; Chaturvedi, Fues, and Sidiropoulos 2012; Abdenur and Da Fonseca 2013).

Although discussions of international South–South cooperation help to understand the importance of strengthening the research ecosystem of non-Western countries, there is a gap in understanding how research agendas are constructed within these cooperative relationships. This gap presents an opportunity for further research to explore the dynamics of research agenda-setting in international cooperation, particularly in the context of power dynamics, construction of meaning, and how they shape the direction and focus of research within these relationships.

One of the core criticisms of the world classification is the fact that it is a form of governance based on a set of rules that are not necessarily consensual, but which are, above all, naturalized as universal. These rules of global governance are based on cognitive patterns linked to ideology, culture, and fixed identities, which are placed as watertight categories that are foreign to the cultural, social, political, and economic pluri-diversity of the countries. Attempts to classify the world in a dichotomous way, such as Center–Periphery or North–South, reduce the political and economic complexity of the analyzed phenomenon. Based on the notion of knowledge circulation in Global Governance, dichotomous categories fail to show a whole set of power dynamics in the circuits of Science, Technology, and Innovation.

Circulation of Knowledge implies a hierarchy of knowledge, in which modern science is given the universal monopoly of dominance over knowledge, through the suppression of local knowledge, particularly that of natives, indigenous peoples, blacks, quilombolas, etc. In this context of disputes over the circuits of scientific production in the global circulation of knowledge, the participation in the implementation of research agendas in these STI spaces of international or transnational institutions, financial foundations, philanthropic or charity foundations, non-departmental public body organizations, and think tanks has been recurrent, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean. With global geopolitical relations shaken by the multipolar displacement of the world, no region of the world has been more at the center of dispute and attention than Latin America (Mori 2020), where until some decades ago, left and center-left governments challenged the traditional Western arrangements that governed the region (Burron 2014). At the same time, in the face of the advances of the right and extreme right in the region in recent years, Latin America and the Caribbean have faced a profound process of de-statization, with the state withdrawing from the responsibility of ensuring investment in science, for example. In this scenario, interstitial and international institutions occupy the space that should be the state's in regards to ensuring epistemic sovereignty through the promotion of science. This occupation provides a path for the neocolonization of knowledge to proceed. This science's neocolonial relationship is a component of the global capitalist agenda agreements, where dominant nations bolster their central position through hierarchical practices in North-South relations, financing research in countries whose scientific ecosystem has been economically and politically disrupted. These relationships are established by the domination over capital, in which a profitable scientific oligopoly and international institutions dictate norms for the evaluation of impact, quality, and scientific legitimacy as universal. In this scenario ruled by capitalism, two circuits are established in a way that creates an abyss between what is central and what is peripheral, between a “quality science” and a peripheral science. In other words, it defines a science that is not measurable by scientific evaluation models, i.e. a science made invisible (Oliveira 2019), in a racialized way, erasing the voices of the subaltern margins from the Global South and the Southern margins inhabiting the North (Dutta et al. 2021).

Colpean and Dingo (2018) observe how much the race-oriented agenda has unfolded as a way of maintaining one’s own power. The authors urge white and Western scholars to be mindful of the policy of capitalizing on the struggles of non-white and/or exotic groups from the “Global South,” which are being used as “interesting” case studies. For the authors, such research under this racialized agenda does not substantially change the dominant structure, and according to them, the scholarly rhetoric of decolonization may inadvertently serve to support the racist practices of academic circuits. In the same vein, Mukherjee (2020) notes that such studies are reified from an “ethnic garment” established by the central countries themselves, which define what non-Westerners should wear: “the more exotic and adventurous the practices being studied, the more enthusiastic will be their reception within the academic environment.” In the context of North–South international relations, where the exoticism agenda manifests itself, the North positions itself as an observer of the South, resembling the human zoos of previous centuries, in which the rhetoric of admiration for creativity in overcoming poverty, asymmetries, and underdevelopment serves as a form of hierarchical power maintenance.

The control of information flows in scientific communication remains under the control of central countries, as well as large technological oligopolies and the scientific publishing market (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015), based on international copyright laws and a system of prestige over the circulation of knowledge (Oliveira 2019; Albuquerque et al. 2020). This recolonization of science is marked, therefore, by the dominance of the spaces of circulation of science, which has been challenged by several initiatives, including the production of epistemologies, infrastructures, and policies of non-central countries, particularly in the multipolar reconfiguration of the world, with the rise of non-Western economies such as China, India, and Russia (Purugganan, Jafri, and Solon 2014; Panda 2016). As a reflection of this multipolar reconfiguration of the world, a shift of ideas is occurring in the South, taking the “rest of the world” (in western point of view) as an example. Non-Western thinkers and practitioners, referred to as “idea-shifters,” have introduced new concepts and approaches that have fundamentally transformed our understanding of development, security, and ecology, among other areas, playing a critical role in establishing postwar governance norms such as sovereignty, social justice and open knowledge, human rights, resistance community ownership, and regionalism (Dutta et al. 2021; Oliveira et al. 2021). In this context, “idea-shifters” emerge in Latin America and the Caribbean, for example, among other parts of the world. Through a structuralist perspective, the LAC “idea-shifters” proposed changes that challenge the global order, such as autonomous development that goes against the subordinated position imposed by the center and redefine hierarchical structures (Fernandez, Moretti, Ormaechea 2022). Nonetheless, the strength of capitalism in promoting agendas is a challenge for structural changes of ideas to happen in the scientific field. Understanding the research agendas financed by international organizations means understanding what the narratives that are expected from Southern researchers tell us about the Global South.

4. Methodology

The Research Questions are:

Who are the stakeholders that are interested in funding the research agenda on the Global South in LAC and what approaches are latent in this construction of knowledge of the South? How does this agenda unfold in LAC and what are the most prevalent conceptual topics in this geopolitical region? We argue that agendas are constructed in different ways by the North in relation to the South, in which the first reinforces a narrative of poverty and precariousness, while the South plays its role as an interlocutor for the production of quality knowledge.

To answer these questions, the methodological proposal of this research is consolidated through an ecosystemic analysis of science (Oliveira 2019), based on lexicometric analysis of abstracts and Content analysis on funded projects from studies about the Global South with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. This research seeks to (1) identify the main research topics through lexicometric analysis (Mandják et al. 2015); (2) identify research agendas and funding agents involving the topic of the “Global South;” and (3) analyze the main stakeholders and their respective research institutions.

Collecting metadata for scientometric analyses from Latin American and Caribbean scientific literature presents unique challenges. Since the 1990s, LAC has increasingly developed its own circuits of scientific production as an alternative to the challenges of indexing in large metadata databases and to counterbalance the predominant anglophone model of global scientific production (Vessuri, Guédon, and Cetto 2014). These alternative circuits are characterized by promoting the preservation of the region’s multilingualism, disciplinary diversity and institutional collaboration, fostering open access as a means to enhance the visibility of Latin American and Caribbean research (Beigel et al. 2023; Alperín, Fischman, & Willinsky, 2008). Faced with this, one major challenge is the lack of standardization in metadata collection practices across different journals and databases in the region. This can result in inconsistencies and variations in the way metadata is recorded, making it difficult to compare and analyze data from different sources. For example, issues related to data availability, quality, and accuracy may arise due to variations in data archiving and preservation practices among Latin American and Caribbean institutions. Additionally, language barriers can pose challenges in extracting and interpreting metadata from non-English publications, which are common in LAC research. These challenges highlight the need for alternative strategies and context-specific approaches to collecting metadata from LAC scientific literature for scientometric analysis.

In addition, considering that funding sources are crucial to understanding how research agendas are consolidated and shape research areas (Smits and Denis 2014), gathering funding data is a major challenge. Few efforts have been made to map scientific research funding, and those that exist rely on existing scientific metadata databases such as Web of Science and Scopus, based on information provided by authors about their funding in acknowledgments. As Mu-Hsuan Huang & Mei-Jhen Huang (2018) discuss, when searching for funding data in the G9 countries on Web of Science, they found that a large part of the information provided by authors did not have a standard format for funding information. Mejia and Kajikawa (2018) analyzed acknowledgments as a form of recognition in the robotics field and also reported difficulty in standardizing data. Paul-Hus, Desroches and Costas (2016) discuss that, despite being discussed since the 1970s, no large-scale indexing of funding analysis was done until 2008, when Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science began adding funding recognition information to its bibliographic records. However, not all types of documents are equally covered for indexing funding information and only articles and reviews show consistent coverage.

Such efforts to obtain complete funding metadata information, with access to project titles and summaries of funded projects, become a barrier to understanding which agendas are of interest to funding agencies. Considering the low presence of LAC studies in the main indexing databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus (Mongeon and Paul-Hus 2016; Vélez-Cuartas, Lucio-Arias, and Leydesdorff 2016; Chavarro, Ràfols, and Tang 2018), and the criticisms regarding the low adequacy of normalization of data from other databases such as Scholar (Jacsó 2005), Dimensions presented itself as a best choice for this study. Dimensions is a source of scientific information that, since 2018, has begun to have increasing importance in the field of scholarly communication. Although it was launched in 2018, its database collects previous metadata, dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Dimensions is considered one of the five main sources of information today, alongside Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and Microsoft Academic (Thelwall 2018; Martín-Martín et al. 2018; Van Eck and Waltman 2010). The choice of Dimensions as the sole base was due to it being a platform that presents an adequate normalization, providing a greater diversity of formats (not only articles) and allowing the crossing of financing data – a key variable for this research. Furthermore, it allows searches by DOI and not by indexing. This helps to collect data from scientific articles that have DOI attribution, expanding the scope of data collection from Latin American and Caribbean journals. Besides considering the importance of Scielo in the region, we were not able to include the online indexing library in our search because it does not provide funding metadata, crucial for this study.

We collected metadata of articles, assuming it is published in a peer-reviewed journal, which mention the exact words “Global South” in titles or abstracts. The keywords used for the search were: “Global South” OR “Sur Global” (Spanish) OR “Sul Global” (Portuguese), in the title or abstract of scientific outputs. The geographical focus of the authorship was the Latin American and Caribbean countries: Argentina OR Barbados OR Bolivia OR Brazil OR Chile OR Colombia OR Costa Rica OR Cuba OR Dominica OR Republic Dominican OR Ecuador OR El Salvador OR Guatemala OR Guyana OR Haiti OR Honduras OR Jamaica OR Mexico OR Nicaragua OR Panama OR Paraguay OR Peru OR Puerto Rico OR Trinidad and Tobago OR Uruguay OR Venezuela. The focus of this study was on scientific articles published in scientific journals, assuming that they are peer-reviewed publications.

A total of 1035 articles were identified with 105 funding projects.¹ The earliest article retrieved dates back to 2003, with a delimitation range spanning until December 2022. Data was structured in a CSV format for analysis. The abstracts were standardized for English. After that, we structured a document in txt format (UTF-8), to generate a lexicometric analysis of semantic networks, using the software Iramuteq, focusing on abstracts. Lexicometric analysis is understood as a set of procedures that are based on formal criteria that reorganize the structure of a text or set of texts based on statistical calculations (Salem, Roth, and Fornango 1983; Marchand and Strawderman 2013). The approach can be characterized as a strategy that applies quantitative methods (descriptive and inferential statistics) to qualitative data (texts) in order to make observations about the characteristics of a set of texts. For this analysis, the clipping on the abstracts was selected.

We employ a lexicometric method to analyze this scientific literature corpus. This method involves utilizing automated content analysis tools to extract insights from a large amount of data based on word frequency and other variables such as specific journals or time periods (Rizzoli, Norton, Sarrica 2021). For lexicometric analysis, the research used the Iramuteq software program for textual analysis and classification of topics using Factor Representation. Iramuteq is an Open Source Data processing software program that uses the R interface for Multidimensional Analysis of Texts (Camargo and Justo 2013). The interpretation of the data was performed based on the observations of the classes and readings of the texts that mention the words that emerged in the classification, seeking approximations of meaning between the articles. The results of the lexicometric analysis provide four analytical thematic categories of approaches addressed: (1) State role and the strength of non-western countries cooperation; (2) Decolonial research, citizen and feminist perspective; (3) Academic Collaboration and Education in circuits of science production and (4) Developmentalism in underdevelopment Global South’s countries (see Results section).

Funding data were collected from the 1035 entries, provided by the Dimensions platform. The funding data were tabulated. Based on the metadata about the funded projects, we conducted a content analysis following the four analytical thematic categories obtained from the lexicometric analysis. We included a content analysis of the type of international relationship cooperation between North and South. The typologies of relationships were structured into South (alone), South–South, South–North, or South–North-South triangular, regardless of the number of countries in cooperation (Modi 2011; Piefer 2014). Another variable in the content analysis was the type of approach in the relationship, according to the literature previously discussed.

Based on that, a content analysis was initiated (Bardin 2016; Sampaio and Lycarião 2021), with two independent encoders, following accepted protocols for the application of the method, aiming to reach a reliable result. The independent coders (author of this research) worked individually on spreadsheets containing the data. Each classification received a numbering from 1 to 4, according to the codebook presented in Table 1, ensuring the accuracy of the coding and making it possible to compare the results. This systematic analysis method allowed for a rigorous and reliable evaluation of the collected data. The collaborative work of the independent coders resulted in a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the data. The result of the reliability analysis of this category was: 88.2% of agreement (82 agreements and 11 disagreements) and Krippendorff’s Alpha of 0.642 (ReCal2 calculation). The 11 divergent cases were discussed by the coders until they reached a consensus.

Table 1. Type of approach.

Category approach	Description	References
North as example of assistance	Based on a predominantly economic agenda, where the prevailing ideas are poverty, insecurity, and precariousness, the North positions itself as an example, determining which initiatives, mechanisms, and systems the South should develop to achieve the ideal level of development. It is a primarily linear development agenda, in which the North presents itself as benevolent when entering into international cooperation partnerships with the South.	Grant (2015); Matthews and Onyemaobi (2020)
North as observer	In this category, researchers from the North involved in research teams are observers of the process, observing what takes place in the South as something exotic, different from their reality. They are absent in the description of the projects, and the focus is on enabling countries of the South to dialogue or display a given characteristic from the South to the North.	Colpean and Dingo (2018); Mukherjee (2020)
Exchange between equals	Funded research that falls into this category starts from a North-South/South-North relationship as equals, in which dialogue is not established based on explicit hierarchies in the reading of abstracts.	Mawdsley, Fourie, and Nauta (2019)
South as an example	In this category, research starts from the South as examples of practices, processes and services that can be applied and used in the Global North, shifting the global order.	Oliveira et al. (2021); Fernandez, Moretti, Ormaechea (2022)

Source: Author’s own work.

5. Results

5.1 Lexicometric analysis

Based on the lexicometric analysis of the abstracts, it was possible to identify terms such as economic development, climate change, poverty, precariousness, malnutrition, violence, and marginalization, which would appear among words such as social justice, human rights, gender equity research, and academic training from a transformative perspective. Among the lexicometric discursive categories, it is possible to interpret it, identifying four clusters that outline the studies on the Global South (Figure 1).

1)

State role and the strength of non-western countries cooperation (green): (red) It was possible to identify a thematic set focused on the role of the state as a guarantor of sovereignty through investment in science, technology, innovation, and education. Terms such as imperialism, capitalism, Westernization and the Cold War are brought from a political and structural perspective. The emergence of the multipolar world stands out, pointing to China as a recurring topic in analyses of the South, especially in relations with LAC and Africa.

Figure 1. Lexicometric analysis of abstracts. Source: Author’s own work (Iramuteq).

Examples:

• The Global South political economy of health financing and spending landscape–history and presence. Journal of medical economics.

• Impactos da disputa geopolítica entre as grandes potências no Sul Global: desestabilização e (des) integração sul-americana. Conjuntura Austra. (translation: Impacts of the geopolitical dispute between the great powers in the Global South: South American destabilization and (dis)integration).

• China y América Latina en tiempos de pandemia: Bases para la construcción de una nueva gobernanza desde el Sur global. Interacción Sino-Iberoamericana/Sino-Iberoamerican Interaction. (translation: China and Latin America in times of pandemic: Bases for the construction of a new governance from the global South)

2)

Decolonial research and feminist perspectives (purple): There is a set of citizen science perspectives, spaces for co-creation and feminist research that appears as a cluster that is tangent to Global South decolonial studies. This cluster moves to issues of power and violence through the rescue of cultural narratives. It recovers issues such as social class, citizenship and identity to rethink the logic of knowledge production and non-hierarchical social relations. It is based on the idea of Epistemologies of the South, which seeks to reflect on the Global South from the perspectives of critical theories.

Examples:

• Old concerns, renewed focus and novel problems: Feminist communication theory and the Global South. Annals of the International Communication Association.

• Ejercicio auto-etnográfico: blanquitud, mestizaje cultural y nomadismo feminista. Revista Periódicus. (translation: Auto-ethnographic exercise: blanquitud, cultural mestizaje and feminist nomadism)

• Conjurando traduções: a tradução coletiva de Caliban and the Witch ao português brasileiro como estratégia feminista transnacional. Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción. (translation: Conjuring translations: the collective translation of Caliban and the Witch into Brazilian Portuguese as a transnational feminist strategy. Mutatis Mutandis).

3)

Academic Collaboration and Education in circuits of science production (red): Predominantly composed of perspectives that aim to enhance and valorize the circuits of science production and higher education, this cluster unfolds in research on the processes of scientific knowledge production and teaching-learning processes that rethink these hierarchical and asymmetric relationships between North and South. They predominantly discuss epistemologies and pedagogical methodologies, the predominance of anglophone circuits in scientific production, with a recurring debate on ethics in the relations of knowledge production.

Examples:

• Neoliberalism, imperialism and conservatism: Tangled logics of educational inequality in the global South. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

• Internacionalização da Educação Superior no território Iberoamericano. Revista Internacional de Educação Superior (translation: Internationalization of Higher Education in Iberoamerica).

• La concepción neoliberal de la educación y sus impactos en el Sur Global: una nueva forma de imperialismo. Foro de Educación. (translation: The neoliberal conception of education and its impacts on Global South a new form of imperialism).

4)

Poverty and underdevelopment of the South (blue): A developmental approach is observed, recovering ECLAC-originated notions of economic development as a unilinear process of achieving equity. It retrieves terms such as stakeholders, administration, and public–private relations to improve the supply of health and environmental services. With a central focus on public policies, terms such as improvement, urban, transportation, and accessibility are present in this cluster, bringing a perspective based on the enhancement in public and private services. It reinforces the place of underdevelopment and poverty of the Global South, providing research on low income, poor urban development, and waste related to climate change. This cluster is configured as an urgent help that the North needs to offer the South, not necessarily considering the responsibility of the central countries in global inequalities.

Examples:

• Divisão Norte-Sul e o Desenvolvimento Sustentável: A Universalidade com Diferenciação Internacional das Responsabilidades Ambientais. Conpedi Law Review. (translation: North–South Division and Sustainable Development: The Universality with International Differentiation of Environmental Responsibilities).

• Closing (Policy): Building international partnerships to support and achieve adaptation and resilience. Earth and Environmental Sciences.

• Aligning urban policy with climate action in the global south: Are Brazilian cities considering climate emergency in local planning practice? Energies.

5.2 Grants

The mapping of grants showed that, among the funding agencies, there is a predominance of funding, mainly by European and North American institutions, from a set of central countries, according to Wallerstein’s (2015) world classification. Dimensions provides information about 105 grants, but only 21 projects presented abstracts. We localized the project on the agency’s website and included the abstract in the spreadsheet. We were not able to find information about 11 projects (10 supported by Ford Foundation and 1 by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). These 11 projects were not considered for our analysis, even though it draws our attention that these grants are distributed between Brazil, Chile and Colombia, with a high concentration in Law Studies [n = 05] and Education [n = 03].

Of the 93 grants located, 58% (n = 54) are from the North and 42% (n = 39) from the South (Figure 2). The temporal distribution shows a growing interest in the subject in the North, while in the South, there is an alternation of interest in the subject. In the case of Brazilian agencies, the platform did not retrieve the global south funding.

Figure 2. Temporal distribution of North vs. South grants by funding agency. Source: Author’s own work.

The fields of research with the highest amount of funding are Anthropology and Development Studies, Geography and Environmental Studies, and Politics and International Studies. Global North funding agencies have a higher investment in the areas of Geography and Environmental Studies (n = 13) and Anthropology and Development Studies (n = 10), while agencies from the Global South (specifically from Brazil) have a greater investment in the areas of Politics and International Studies (n = 06) and Architecture, Built Environment, and Planning (n = 05) (Figure 3).²

Figure 3. Distribution of grants between fields of research. Source: Author’s own work.

The themes with the highest amount of investment from Northern global funding agencies in the field of Geography and Environmental Studies are urbanism and cities, gender-based violence, working conditions, and modes of resilience. Meanwhile, in Anthropology and Development Studies, the largest amount of investment from Northern agencies is directed towards mobility and migration (n = 04), but with a diversity of topics such as consumption, food, and industrialization. On the other hand, Southern agencies in this field of Anthropology and Development Studies focus on research on asymmetrical internationalization (n = 02) and resistance and rebellions against precarious working conditions (n = 02). In Political Science, the most recurring themes are internationalization (for Southern agencies) and economic development (for Northern agencies).

Identifying the themes from the lexicometric analysis, it is possible to notice that grants from the North tend to present a theme based on development perspectives, where poverty and underdevelopment are recurrent topics in the funding obtained. On the other hand, among agencies in the South, research prevails in which the role of the state is central in providing international cooperation initiatives, especially seeking to strengthen non-Western countries’ relationships (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Radial graph of North vs. South grant thematics. Source: Author’s own work.

It is conceivable that a considerable number of studies carried out by Latin American researchers may not be indexed in Dimensions or may not provide explicit disclosure of the funding sources for their research endeavors. Taking this into consideration, we focus our attention on understanding the institutions involved in funding research in the Global North.

Most of the research funded by Northern agencies subsidizes international relations projects between North and South, or triangular. We observed the predominance of research on the Global South, originating from the promotion of the South, taking the South as an example, or as the exchange between North and South as equals. In turn, research from grants from the North mainly emphasize poverty and underdevelopment of the South as the center of research. The research supported by Northern agencies tends to have an approach as an observer of the forms of interaction in the South, without making clear the role they play in international cooperation, or they tend to present an approach in which methodologies, theories, and epistemologies are provided to the South as a service to developing countries (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Flows between agencies, types of relation and types of approach. Source: Author’s own work.

We identified 12 funding institutions from the Global North financing research on the theme of the Global South (Table 2).

Table 2. funding institutions.

Agency	Type of agency	Country	N. of projects
Arts and Humanities Research Council	Non-departmental public body	United Kingdom	5
Australian Research Council	Government	Australia	1
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft	Non-departmental public body	Germany	10
Economic and Social Research Council	Non-departmental public body	United Kingdom	14
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council	Non-departmental public body	United Kingdom	2
European Research Council	Public body	Belgium	8
Hewlett Foundation	Private foundation	United States	2
Natural Environment Research Council	Non-departmental public body	United Kingdom	1
Swiss National Science Foundation	Government	Switzerland	5
UK Research and Innovation	Non-departmental public body	United Kingdom	1
Wellcome Trust	Charitable foundation	United Kingdom	3

Source: Author’s own work.

We noticed that the ones who finance projects about the Global South the most are the United Kingdom (n = 26), Germany (n = 10), and the European Union (n = 8). Differently from Latin American and Caribbean countries, whose subsidy in the region is predominantly provided by government agencies, one can perceive an ecosystem of philanthropic and non-governmental foundation typologies supporting the Global South’s thematic of projects whose researchers are from LAC.

6. Discussion

The Global South agenda has been recurrent, even circulating as visibility strategies for the Global North, aiming to present policies of equity of scientific circulation, which often become demagogic in nature. Special editions of de-Westernization with high publication rates or scientific events on the Global South with exorbitant registration fees have been recurrent in countries that have always dominated the spaces of circulation of science in the World System. Conversely, the countries of the South, which are more affected by economic crises, often derived from exchange rate fluctuations, end up not participating in these spaces of knowledge circulation, reinforcing asymmetries between North and South. The power of core countries over non-Western countries has been observed in different fields of knowledge (Grosfoguel 2008). Colpean and Dingo (2018) observe how much the race-oriented agenda has unfolded as a means of maintaining one’s own power. They urge white and Western scholars to recognize how the struggles and domination of non-white and/or exoticized groups in the “Global South” are being capitalized on as “interesting” case studies without substantially changing the dominant structure or the scholarly rhetoric of decolonization. According to the authors, this may inadvertently serve to perpetuate racist practices in the field. In the same vein, Mukherjee (2020), Bernardino-Costa and Grosfoguel (2016) note that such studies are reified from an “ethnic garment” established by the central countries themselves, which define what non-Western people should wear: “the more exotic and adventurous the practices being studied, the more enthusiastic will be their reception within the academic environment.”

Exoticity is understood as an ethnic garb in which countries in the Global North position themselves as observers of something they perceive as different from their own reality. In addition to exoticity, the rhetoric of development as a solution to poverty is another rhetorical form that Northern countries tend to reproduce, reinforcing the notion that the South, unlike the North, is marked by precarity and difference. Revisiting the developmentalism perspective rooted in the concepts of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), which has already become less relevant in Latin American and Caribbean discourse (Mazzetti et al. 2021), involves strategies that reinforce a narrative predominantly embraced in the Global North. This narrative tends to absolve the North of its responsibility for global inequalities within the ongoing debate. Furthermore, by positioning themselves as an example of assistance and benevolence to “poor and precarious” countries, they absolve themselves of responsibility for capital accumulation in global inequalities.

On one hand, we were able to observe in the literature different perspectives being adopted through lexicometric analyses of published articles. A predominance of theoretical debates, identity, and decolonial perspectives have emerged as one of the main approaches. This perspective is mediated by another approach in which the debates revolve around issues related to academic relations and challenges of internationalization in predominantly Anglophone and Western circuits. This approach is directly related to a search for multilateral strengthening in the face of the emergence of a multipolar world. Research on the BRICS countries, for example, shows how much this debate is present in the literature and brings a perspective of resistance to a Western model that no longer fits the multipolar world we live in today. Finally, almost as disconnected from this discussion as the critical and decolonial approaches, there is a perspective that reinforces poverty, underdevelopment, precariousness, and primary economy as a present axis in Latin American literature on the Global South. In turn, the projects funded, especially by agencies and institutions from the North, seem to ignore this diversity of approaches and the importance of the state for the international strengthening of non-Western countries. Perhaps, this is not a narrative that interests the North because it challenges the structures of domination of the North that have been in place for decades and which today find the possibility of being contested by new economic, epistemological, intellectual, and structural models and arrangements where the North is no longer the “center of the world.”

The ability to define the research agenda becomes a strategic political asset, insofar as it allows the appreciation of scientifically validated truth to perspectives originated in central countries. In the current model of neoliberal globalization of the scientific circuit, the dominion over the information flows of scientific communication remains under the so-called central countries. Europe emerged as a result of this research as interlocutors for Latin America and the Caribbean, as a reflection of a process of European colonization that left deep structural marks on society in general (Walsh 2010; Mignolo 2017), which are reflected today in the scientific field. The continuous domain of spaces and circuits of scientific knowledge production is also understood as a process of recolonization or recurrent neocolonization (Quijano 2005) without the necessary epistemic disobedience (Mignolo 2008). The implementation of agendas based on perspectives that emphasize poverty, underdevelopment, and precariousness, in approaches where Western countries position themselves as observers or as assisters for later development, is also a way of recolonizing imaginations that reinforce global hierarchies.

Nevertheless, it is also highlighted that the multipolar configuration of the world guides studies on the Global South. This domain, however, has been challenged by a number of initiatives, including in the production of epistemologies, infrastructures and policies originating from the South itself. Moreover, the emergence of China as a major world power has pointed to a reconfiguration of the world system, with LAC a playing a key role in this process. It is one of the regions at the forefront in the creation of their own scientific circuits and infrastructures that are less dependent on central countries (Beigel 2013, 2016, 2019; Vessuri, Guédon, and Cetto 2014). It is also persistent in the production of its own epistemologies that tell scientific narratives from rationalities that do not reinforce the place of poverty and underdevelopment – despite acknowledging this as a global problem. The bipolar order of the world between North and South has served as a material foundation for the asymmetric academic model and pressures for a more plural academic environment are becoming increasingly common, challenging this emerging reconfiguration of the multipolar world system. This multipolar reconfiguration of the world could allow the recovery of political, racialized, and gender-based crossings (Escobar 2003; Grosfoguel 2012; Bernardino-Costa and Grosfoguel 2016) beyond the economic ones, from when the global North–South division was established as a concept to understand the division of the world.

7. Final remarks

This research provides a first analysis of LAC publications containing the terms “Global South” which aims to understand the Global South Agendas built in the region. Based on the analysis of research promotion on the Global South in LAC, it was possible to observe the prevalence of a perspective that reinforces the place of poverty and underdevelopment of the Global South, as objects of analysis, without a critical discussion on the role of the North in generating and maintaining these inequalities in the South. The research also showed that funding from agencies in the South supported more research that originated from the South as an example for the North or understanding the South and the North as equals. The methodology proposed here allows us to understand the Latin American publications containing the terms “Global South” which aim to understand the Global South Agendas built in the region.

These results also point to the need to consider what agendas about the South are being brought to this scientific narrative dispute in this binary classification of the world. Although limited to the production of Latin America and the Caribbean on the term Global South, this research provides initial support to seek comparative studies with other geopolitical regions of the world.

The limits of this research are recognized by the data collected from only one platform – Dimensions – which, despite being considered the most robust platform with more data retrieved (Thelwall 2018), resulting in a lack of coverage, particularly in relation to grants in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is plausible to assume that a significant proportion of research conducted by Latin American scholars may not be included in the “Dimensions” database or may lack explicit disclosure of the funding sources that supported their research projects. In this work, we could not understand which narratives and institutions from the Global South support research on the Global South. It is necessary to conduct more in-depth studies with funding agencies to collect adequate metadata to understand how the South constructs the idea of the South, that is, how the South's agenda is implemented by the South with a range of Latin American and Caribbean countries beyond Brazil. It becomes important to bring more data from LAC development agencies and scientific information produced in circuits at regional or local level. Another limitation of the study is the inability to retrieve data from researchers in the diaspora, a frequent reality in Latin American and Global South countries (Brown 2006; Demir 2017; Overmyer and Sepúlveda 2018). Also, despite recognizing the existence of other terms associated with the so-called Global South Studies, using terms such as Decolonialism, Subalternity, or through other terms invoking economic perspectives, may risk reinforcing the reading of countries in the Global South as developing countries. As we argued before, besides recognizing the existence of other terms in Global South vocabulary, the Global South Agenda has been used as a key term to presuppose a unity in a diverse place, used to reinforce a colonial narrative of precarity and subalternity. The use of the unique term (Global South) aims to understand the agenda in its very essence, to identify which scientific narratives are linked to the key concept of Global South.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico [grant number 311258/2019-0]; Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro [grant number E-26/201.299/2021].

Notes on contributors

Thaiane Moreira de Oliveira

Thaiane Moreira de Oliveira is a professor in the Graduate Program in Communication at the Federal Fluminense University, and member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. She is a researcher at the UNESCO Chair on Policies for Multilingualism, researcher member of the National Institute of Science and Technology in Disputes and Informational Sovereignty (DSI), Public Communication of Science (CPCT), and Comparative Studies in Conflict Management (InEAC).Coordinator of Citelab - Research Laboratory in Science, Innovation, Technology and Education.

Marcus Vinicius de Jesus Bomfim

Marcus Vinicius de Jesus Bomfim is PhD candidate in Communication at Federal Fluminense University. Member of Citelab - Research Laboratory in Science, Innovation, Technology and Education at Federal Fluminense University.

Notes

1 Although Dimensions was the sole database used for this analysis, a search for articles was conducted on other platforms such as Web of Science and Scopus. However, Dimensions proved to be the most comprehensive database, yielding 1035 articles, of which 203 mentioned project funding in the acknowledgements section. In Scopus, we collected 863 articles, of which 10 mentioned funding projects in the acknowledgements section. Similarly, in Web of Science, we found 838 articles, with 31 funding projects presented in the acknowledgements section. In line with previous literature (Huang and Huang 2018; Mejia and Kajikawa 2018; Paul-Hus, Desroches and Costas, 2016), funding information in metadata databases is not standardized. In Web of Science, out of the 31 funding projects mentioned in the acknowledgments, 21 had grant numbers. In Scopus, out of the 10 funding acknowledgments, 8 had information on grant numbers. Web of Science and Scopus did not provide project abstracts, becoming an impediment for qualitative-quantitative analysis (thematic analysis and content analysis). We identified 106 project funding entries in the Dimensions Platform, but only 93 had abstract information, including at the website agency.

2 Units of assessment classification provided by the Dimension platform.