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Introduction
A substantial body of literature holds that “institutions do not travel well” [Machinea 2005: 4; Rodrik 2007: 41; Drezner 2009: 190; Rafiqui 2009: 347; Lambach and Debiel 2010: 160; Morlino 2016: 32], and are particularly ill-disposed toward long-distance travel [Berkowitz et al. 2003; Roland 2004; Seidler 2014], with the Latin American experience frequently being invoked by way of example. After all, the region bears the scars of a number of dubious imports including French legal codes that by all accounts work better at home than abroad [Merryman 1996; Beck et al. 2003; Berkowitz et al. 2003; LaPorta et al. 2008; Kogut 2012]; presidential regimes that are purportedly prone to gridlock in the United States and golpes south of the border [Linz 1990; Misztal 1992; Helmke 2010; cf. Lipset 1994]; and a Washington Consensus—codified by a British expatriate, no less [Edwards 2010: 65]—that has proven disappointing to supporters as well as critics [Williamson 1997; Offe 2000; Przeworski 2004; Centeno and Cohen 2012; Connell and Dados 2014]. Observers of the region have therefore abandoned the idea of “blueprints” and “best practices” [Rodrik 2000: 14; Evans 2004: 30] for aphorisms like “one size doesn’t fit all” [Pritchett and Woolcock 2002: 3], “context matters” [Portes 2005: 38], and “Latin American solutions to Latin American problems” [Tanner 2008: 260; Ignatieff 2014: 465; Bertucci 2015: 108; Escanho 2015: 2].
The latter slogan, in particular, echoes the call for “southern solutions to southern problems” [UNESCO 2013: 9; see also UNCTAD 2010: 4; Zhou 2010: 4; UNDP 2011: 420; Thomas 2013: 1; ILO 2013a: 11; WHO 2014: 11] that has been gaining support in the donor community and which is invoked to explain the diffusion of special economic zones and conditional cash transfers in Asia and Africa. “Born out of similar development contexts and sometimes even familiar cultural background,” explain Xiaojun Grace Wang and Shams Banihani of the United Nations Development Programme, “these southern solutions often prove to be more relevant” [Wang and Banihani 2016: 15] than northern imports that are rigid, costly, and/or ill-suited to their new surroundings.
Latin American vocational training institutions (VTIs) have been portrayed as another southern solution [UNDP 2009: 167; Amorim et al. 2013: 5; ILO 2013b: 18]. After all, the “Latin...