INTRODUCTION: Over the past two decades, the global landscape of development and cooperation has shifted dramatically. The 2007–2008 financial crisis exposed vulnerabilities in Western economies and created space for new actors to emerge as influential providers of ideas, models, and instruments in international policy-making. Among these, Brazil and China have taken center stage—not only as recipients of global policies, but as active contributors to the international circulation of knowledge and public policy.

Following a growing body of literature in policy studies, international relations and development cooperation, this volume brings these two countries into dialogue, offering a comparative reflection on their roles as rising powers through the lens of policy transfer studies. Unlike traditional research that focuses on North-North or North-South transfers, this book centers the experiences of Brazil and China to illuminate alternative pathways of development and cooperation.

Drawing on a rich array of case studies in health, food security, and infrastructure, the volume presents a multidimensional framework for understanding how ideas travel across borders, institutions, and scales—from local to supranational. It reflects on the historical legacies of South-South Cooperation and the multiple shifts that have accompanied the rise of new global actors, tracing how domestic transformations and geopolitical reconfigurations have shaped their international engagements.

Written by scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, deeply engaged with the evolving dynamics of global governance, this volume contributes both theoretically and empirically to the study of policy transfer, development cooperation, and international relations. It invites readers to rethink the geography of ideas and the future of global policy-making in a multipolar world, while encouraging a new generation of scholars to deepen their understanding of how knowledge and policy circulate across regions and regimes.