Authors

Discussion

This paper focuses on the role that socialist countries played in shaping industrial development at the multilateral level, during the long 1970s. It investigates, first, the role that agro-industrial development played in the conceptualisation of socialist industrialist futures.

It then takes the case of the “Joint UNIDO-Yugoslav Centre for International Co-operation for the Development of Agro-Industry in Developing Countries”, established in Novi Sad (Serbia) in 1975 to support scientific and technical exchanges between socialist and developing countries. This centre rationalised and institutionalised the kind of bilateral scientific and technical cooperation that Yugoslav companies had been conducting with developing countries, by creating a network of exchange, trainings, scientific conferences, and study missions. From this case study, the paper will analyse how knowledge exchange, management and expertise were conceptualised and transferred between the socialist and developing world, and will thus investigate what forms and conceptualisations of development emerged in this context.