Presenting the Latin American option

The Latin America Centre of Asia–Pacific Excellence (LatAm CAPE) at Victoria University of Wellington was created by the previous National-led government to prepare New Zealanders to engage and do business with Latin America. Through its programmes, resources and partnerships it has introduced exporters, students and other sectors of society to the economies and cultures of this neglected region and to successful ways of engaging with it. Its journey has revealed definite interest in greater links with Latin America, and its innovations have prepared the ground for relations to grow and for Latin America to appear on more Kiwis’ mental maps.

In June 2016 New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce invited our nation’s universities to establish ‘Centres of Asia–Pacific Excellence’ as focal points for New Zealand’s relationships with North Asia, South-east Asia and Latin America. Underpinning this invitation was a belief in the importance of each region to our nation’s future economic success and a desire to unlock expertise on them within academia to benefit exporters, students and officials.1 I was in the room at Victoria University of Wellington when the minister extended this offer, and, as the president of the Latin America New Zealand Business Council at the time, I saw it as an unprecedented opportunity to strengthen our country’s ties to our Latin neighbours across the Pacific. Nine months later, therefore, I was delighted when the next tertiary education minister, Paul Goldsmith, also came to Victoria to announce that my university would host the Latin America and South-east Asia ‘CAPEs’ and the University of Auckland would host their North Asia peer.

Dr Matthew O’Meagher is the director of the Latin America Centre of Asia–Pacific Excellence at Victoria University of Wellington. He was previously the founding director of the New Zealand Centre for Latin American Studies, New Zealand’s first education counsellor for Latin America and president of the Latin America New Zealand Business Council.

How then to seize this opportunity? In keeping with the joint bid we had made, the three centres would be managed by a consortium of both these institutions, plus Waikato and Otago universities. Accordingly, our response to our mandate would need to draw on the interests and strengths of the four partners and be co-ordinated with them. Each centre was given clear riding instructions by our funding agency, the Tertiary Education Commission, and shown how our plans and outcomes would be monitored. Individually, we were told what our mission, objectives and expected impacts and outcomes were; for the ‘LatAm’ CAPE, they included creating ‘a step change in New Zealanders’ knowledge and skills relating to Latin America’ and enhancing ‘public awareness of the importance of Latin America to New Zealand and in the world’.² Collectively, also, we were asked to help New Zealand become better prepared to do business and engage with the Asia–Pacific region, to enhance economic, trade, political and cultural relationships there, and to focus most of our attention on two distinct spheres: small business and education. As we all began our work, furthermore, we were encouraged to achieve some ‘quick wins’.

First initiatives
To be useful to businesses, the LatAm CAPE had to start with two facts: most Kiwi exporters did not see Latin America as a market, nor did small and medium enterprises typically turn to academia for advice. The first fact put us in a different space from our North Asia and South-east Asia peers: whereas they had to differentiate themselves from other organisations helping Kiwis approach their regions, our challenge was — and is — to grow awareness of the benefits of doing business with Latin America. From our beginnings to the present, therefore, much of our work for businesses has focused on introducing the opportunity Latin America provides to exporters willing to enter its markets carefully and in an informed way, and on explaining why the region can be profitable for them — despite its absence from most trade forums and some negative stereotypes it bears. To overcome the second hurdle, meanwhile, we knew we had to innovate in the ways we transferred knowledge to make insights about Latin America available to smaller firms. In our early years, therefore, we created a range of accessible and high-quality outputs, from videos of Kiwis succeeding in Brazil through to workshops and exporter case studies. Because we were an unfamiliar entity, too, it made sense for us to develop some projects with established agencies like New Zealand Trade and Enterprise or New Zealand Story, who businesses already looked to for advice on market development options, and to speak at events by Latin American embassies or the Business Council to encourage exports there.

In the education sector our task was even bigger: aside from promising enrolments in Spanish courses Latin America was absent from New Zealand classrooms. To address the dearth of content on that region in our schools and to associate Latin America with creativity, therefore, we created trilingual resources to share New Zealand children’s stories and art about Latin America and an award-winning VR-based tool exploring sustainable tourism around Machu Picchu, then put them on a ‘TeachAPAC’ website established by a dedicated ‘cross-CAPE’ education team at Waikato. To start a talent pipeline of future leaders of Latin America, we worked with the Young Enterprise Trust to send cohorts of its ambitious entrepreneurial high school students to Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Argentina. And at the tertiary level, we worked with the other CAPEs on internship programmes and devised targeted mobility initiatives to complement Education New Zealand’s flourishing Prime Minister’s Scholarships for Latin America scheme and universities’ existing exchange programmes.

With another of our target clients, conversely, there was more of a base to build on. That client was the ‘public’, and in them we saw an openness to Latin American culture and a chance to highlight cultural affinities. Because of its reach into towns and cities across our nation, therefore, we helped (and continue to help) Latin American embassies in Wellington market their annual Latin America and Spain Film Festival. Given the rugby connections between New Zealand and Argentina, we put on a half-time show at a Hurricanes–Jaguares game that generated a record number of visits to the Argentine embassy’s website, and to underline our base in academia we contracted educators, students and interns to produce an exhibition on Mexican food systems shown in Wellington, Christchurch, Foxton and Titirangi. More recently, too, we have switched from individual cultural projects to initiatives that cover the spectrum of the creative economies and reach wider constituencies. Over the last two years, we have run a national Aotearoa Spanish Language Week, in which we work with diaspora communities and high-profile individuals to promote the value of learning Spanish. Late last year, similarly, we launched a ‘Creative Collaborations’ website that ‘reveals the projects, people and institutions at the forefront’ of New Zealand’s ‘creative engagement with Latin America’.³

Extensive experience
Behind our CAPE’s early efforts were decades of experience our staff had acquired in fostering ties with Latin America. From 2020 onwards, however, the findings of annual polling we did of the New Zealand public and businesses informed our response to our mission as well. The results of these polls not only gave us an evidence base to test our assumptions and instincts against; they also showed us there was real interest among our compatriots in knowing more about Latin America. Among the most encouraging results were the fact that 84–87 per cent of business respondents between 2019 and 2021 thought Latin America was important to New Zealand; that 89–90 per cent of them thought knowledge of local ways of doing things was essential to success; that 71–84 per cent of them supported New Zealanders learning more Spanish or Portuguese; and that lack of knowledge or news about Latin America were among the biggest barriers to greater trade.4 In our most recent poll last November, in addition, we saw that business interest in Latin America had recovered from a decline in 2022, and that business respondents ‘nearly universally agreed that enjoyment and knowledge of languages and culture were important for business success’ there.⁵

The same blend of personal knowledge and poll evidence further encouraged us to support a distinguishing aspect of engagement with Latin America in any way we could: indigenous connections. From Chile in particular (but Brazil and Colombia as well) we saw a desire to learn about Māori experiences and interactions with the state in Aotearoa New Zealand, and in our polling we saw support for New Zealand entities to work with Latin American counterparts in promoting indigenous economic development. Across different stages of our own journey, therefore — and on top of the work a cross-CAPE Māori team at Waikato was doing to build an ecosystem of Māori students and businesses — we sponsored an MPI Māori agri-women’s delegation to Colombia, a Universities New Zealand indigenous languages revitalisation summit in Brazil, an indigenous education delegation to Chile, a programme introducing Māori and Pasifika businesses to Mexico and Colombia, a multilingual indigenous stories website from an alumna of that programme and an internship for one of the Waikato Māori team at the United Nations’ regional office in Santiago.

If we were to move the dial on connecting New Zealanders to Latin America, however, we knew we needed to win over hearts as well as minds. Our most ambitious project as we entered the current decade, therefore, was an ‘Amazon Raised Up Sky’ augmented reality tool we commissioned from the artist Joseph Michael, director of AUT’s ArtScience Lab. He was known to a team member through his work on projecting melting icebergs onto the UN building in New York, and in 2020 he turned his attention to capturing and visualising data on Amazonian ecosystems for us. By the end of that year he was presenting the fruits of filming in Brazil and a documentary about this new project filled venues and enthralled audiences throughout our land. In a second phase of the project, too, he converted this art, science and sustainability resource into an educational tool, ‘The Majestic Samaúma’, which was made available to schools through the CAPEs’ TeachApac website and Waikato’s Science Learning Hub.⁶ When our Waikato colleagues ran a large forum on global citizenship education last year, therefore, Michael was a natural choice to be an opening speaker.

Nimble responses
Making Joseph Michael’s work even more remarkable was the way he delivered it in the year Covid-19 hit. He was not the only one showing resourcefulness in connecting CAPE stakeholders to our regions during lockdowns, however; rather, the entire CAPE ecosystem found nimble new ways across 2020–21 to expose our diverse audiences to Latin America, North Asia and South-east Asia despite closed borders. For the LatAm CAPE, a prime example was our conversion of our study tours with Young Enterprise into domestic programmes which took new cohorts to the headquarters of New Zealand companies exporting to our region. A second and more orthodox change was our response to the disruption of supply chains through webinars and seminars exploring how Latin America could enter new dialogues around market diversification.⁷

To exacerbate the challenges we faced at this time, the CAPEs were simultaneously transforming ourselves in response to a scheduled mid-term review. In that review we were told that while we were all doing valuable things, the focus of the three centres was so different that stakeholders were struggling to understand what the overall CAPE project was about. To enhance our collective impact, therefore, we needed to streamline our activity, agree on a common strategy and build ‘stronger strategic relationships with complementary NZ organisations’.⁸ Over the course of that year, therefore, we developed a model for the next five years that focused on four ‘interconnected priority areas’, with ‘thought leaderships’ and ‘connectivity’ added to business and education. Alongside each CAPE’s embedded and strengthening work streams there would now be increased efforts to ‘leverage connections and partnerships’ and new programmes ‘to advance a whole-of-consortium approach to develop Asia–Pacific informed citizens’.9

From 2021 onwards, accordingly, new initiatives that touched all three CAPE regions arose to complement the continuing work of the headquarters teams to share subject matter expertise and content on their individual region. Prominent among these trans-regional innovations were the global citizenship and Māori ecosystem initiatives from Waikato noted above and an ‘Aotearoa Explorers’ children’s e-game and ‘Asia–Pacific Insights’ website developed at Otago. At the same time each CAPE consolidated its own portfolio. For the LatAm CAPE, new emphases included ‘building a critical mass of engagement to underpin wider, deeper and sustained relations with Latin

America; reframing the Latin America region in ways that raised awareness, challenged perceptions and grew understanding and capability; and fostering closer academic connections to address major issues of our time’.

One outcome of the tweaked approach produced immediate fruit and attracted international attention. ‘Winds of Change’ is a multi-disciplinary sustainability network between New Zealand and Chile that was imagined by an Otago academic, is delivered by Otago CAPE staff and is enabled and enriched by the LatAm CAPE deputy director. Through webinars, field trips and joint applied research projects it connects post-graduate students and early career professionals in both countries who are interested in addressing the common climate change challenges their societies face through the lenses of science, business, science policy and science communication.10 Now in its fourth year, Winds of Change has spawned two spinoffs: a parallel programme on North Asia with that CAPE and a multinational project created by one of its Chilean alumni, ‘The Ocean that Connects Us’, that sees school students at Auckland’s Rosmini College connecting with peers in Chile, Peru, Singapore, South Korea, India, the United States and Finland. Importantly, too, Winds of Change has become a valued contributor to official bilateral relations. In 2022 it featured in dialogues between then-Education Minister Chris Hipkins and Chile’s Ministry of Education and Council of Rectors, and in 2024 a visit of programme alumni to Chile is being planned with the New Zealand embassy’s assistance in Santiago.

Nor was Winds of Change the only new project to capitalise on the CAPEs’ inherent advantage over other entities introducing New Zealanders to the world: the privileged access to tertiary students they enjoyed through being based in universities. At the ‘cross-CAPE’ level, a professional development programme was developed by the North Asia CAPE for students attached to all three centres, new recruits were sent to NZIIA and Diplosphere conferences and the APEC Voices programme became a CAPEs responsibility. With borders re-opening, also, study tours resumed to all three CAPE regions, including an Open Doors mission to Chile last year to strengthen Spanish language capability. For the LatAm CAPE, however, our biggest push in this area was to create a Latin America Young Professionals Network under the Latin America New Zealand Business Council, or LANZBC, to mirror the Asia New Zealand Foundation’s Leadership Network. Behind this effort lay two impulses. First, we had had the privilege of interacting with some outstanding potential leaders of future relations with Latin America, so wanted to support their transition from the educational to professional worlds so they could become advocates for Latin American links in their workplaces. Second, this investment in the future was essential, as most of our country’s current business leaders were still not interested in the potential for trade with Latin America to boost our economy.

Changing conversations
As the history of New Zealand’s ties to Asia shows, it can take decades and even generations for a society to change the way it looks at a region, and for marginal markets to become central. Because the Latin America CAPE was funded to have immediate impacts not just long-term outcomes, however, we redoubled our efforts to influence the present as well. In line with the postReview strategy, we worked even closer with key stakeholders than we had since our birth. With the LANZBC, for example, we signed a strategic partnership and collaborated on events with ministers. With the NZTE, we co-developed a new set of videos showcasing small and medium enterprises succeeding in Latin America and how that region was ‘bursting with opportunities’ for New Zealand exporters.11 With support from Education New Zealand, we joined minister Hipkins’ mission to Brazil and Chile as soon as international flights resumed. Invited by MFAT, we attended meetings of the government agencies most interested in Latin America. And supported by MFAT, NZTE, MPI, ENZ and the Ministry of Education, we developed a new data visualisation app, launched in February, that maps New Zealand’s ties to Latin America across business, diplomacy, education and society in ways that demonstrated that those links are far more widespread and numerous than is often appreciated.

In keeping with the CAPEs’ new focus on ‘connectivity’, too, we came up with another way to build a critical mass of multisector engagement to propel more relationships and show that New Zealanders were interacting with Latin America across diverse walks of life. Fortuitously, the last three years have seen a number of diplomatic anniversaries with Latin American nations, and these anniversaries have allowed us to organise events in Parliament that have brought together politicians, ambassadors, officials, academics, teachers, students, diaspora leaders and international affairs observers to celebrate bilateral ties in style. Many speakers or attendees at these gatherings have told us how honoured or touched they were to be part of these commemorations, while others have said that by hearing of connections beyond their own silos they learned about links between New Zealand and these countries of which they had no idea.

In our last months of current funding, furthermore, we have taken one further pioneering step to insert Latin America into more conversations about New Zealand’s future in uncertain times. Following the warm reception to a report on New Zealand’s trade relationship, barriers and opportunities with Latin America we commissioned last year,12 we commissioned four more studies that shine a light on significant but little-known aspects of our country’s ties with Latin America or speculate on new pathways to strengthen those ties. The themes of these studies are diplomatic synergies, supply chains and green transitions, trans-Tasman approaches to Latin America and Latin America and the South Pacific. And the research for them has revealed some significant points about the state of connections between New Zealand and Latin America today.

First, and most importantly — and despite most of their peers’ inattention to the region — influential businesspeople, officials, academics and commentators in our country see Latin America as important enough to New Zealand’s future to support these studies as formal advisers. Second, while they identify real hurdles to deeper relations, they also see niches where meaningful co-operation has occurred or could occur if fostered well. Certain themes kept recurring in their feedback as well, such as the common challenges New Zealand and its

Latin neighbours face, the number of areas in which they could work together, the need to strengthen transport connections, how language is a perceived barrier, the growing importance of Latin America’s strategic minerals, how international relations and supply chains are in flux, and how Māori–Pakeha relations and our nation’s green and independent reputation separate New Zealand out from other nations competing for Latin American attention. For several of these allies, too, perceptions of Latin America are critically important, as are the narratives we tell about the region through these commissioned studies and our other communications.

As we reflect on our journey as New Zealand’s only publicly funded entity focused on Latin America, therefore, we can draw important conclusions about the wider state of New Zealand’s links with this region. On the one hand, there is still much to do to put Latin America on Kiwis’ radars in non-superficial ways; on the other, we know from the generosity of our stakeholders in backing our work and from the impact it has had on participants there is an appetite for New Zealanders to become closer to Latin America. We have also seen that there are multiple ways to change perceptions, and that some sectors will be readier to change than others.

Timeframes matter too: in a context of geo-economic turbulence and constrained finances, we must attempt to shape the present, and seize advantageous openings like our new government’s interest in looking beyond our shores; simultaneously, though, we must also chip away patiently at barriers and stereotypes, and invest in how we want relations to look like when today’s youth become decision-makers. Above all, however, we must be realistic about present constraints in relations, but passionate about overcoming those constraints. The more we and other friends of Latin America in our society can do this, the more prospects there will be for Latin America to become an obvious choice for New Zealanders’ attention, like Asia now is.

Notes
1. Steven Joyce, ‘$34.5 million for new Centres of Asia–Pacific Excellence’, 17 Jun 2016 (www.beehive.govt.nz/release/345-million-newcentres-asia-pacific-excellence), and Hansard, oral question 4, 5 Jul 2016.

2. Tertiary Education Commission, ‘Outcome statement for Latin America Centre of Asia–Pacific Excellence’ (www.tec.govt.nz/assets/ Publications-and-others/a19fea5cdf/Outcome-statement-for-LatinAmerica-CAPE.pdf).

3. creativecollaborations.nz/.

4. cape.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Kiwi-perceptions-of-Lat in-America-2021-presentation.pdf.

5. Talbot Mills Research, ‘General Public and Businesss results: CAPE – Latin America’, Nov–Dec 2023, p.2.

6. cape.org.nz/amazon-raised-up-sky/ and www.majesticsamauma. com/.

7. ‘Diversification as a Response to Trade Disruptions: Perspectives from New Zealand and Chile’ (youtu.be/_q5ragfke4A); ‘New Zealand, Mexico and North American Supply Chains’ (youtube/2AkxwVjWgkk); and ‘CAPE Business Series: Diversifying into new Asia–Pacific Markets’ (youtube/6BZ2G_n7XDs).

8. TEC, ‘Review of the Centre of Asia Pacific Excellence Fund, 2022’, p.3.

9. Centres of Asia–Pacific Excellency Strategy 2020–2025, and ‘Learn More about the CAPEs’ (cape.org.nz/about-us/).

10. ‘Winds of Change — Latin America’ (cape.org.nz/winds-of -change-latam/).

11. www.nzte.govt.nz/page/latin-america-bursting-with-opportunities.

12. cape.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Sense-Partners-NZLATAM-Trade-Report-30-June-2022.pdf.

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