China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the largest infrastructure scheme in our lifetime, bringing unprecedented geopolitical and economic shifts far larger than previous rising powers. Concerns about its environmental impacts are legitimate and threaten to thwart China’s ambitions, especially since there is little precedent for analysing and planning for environmental impacts of massive infrastructure development at the scale of BRI. In this paper, we review infrastructure development under BRI to characterise the nature and types of environmental impacts and demonstrate how social, economic and political factors can shape these impacts. We first address the ambiguity around how BRI is defined. Then we describe our interdisciplinary framework for considering the nature of its environmental impacts, showing how impacts interact and aggregate across multiple spatiotemporal scales creating cumulative impacts. We also propose a typology of BRI infrastructure, and describe how economic and socio-political drivers influence BRI infrastructure and the nature of its environmental impacts. Increasingly, environmental policies associated with BRI are being designed and implemented, although there are concerns about how these will translate effectively into practice. Planning and addressing environmental issues associated with the BRI is immensely complex and multi-scaled. Understanding BRI and its environment impacts is the first step for China and countries along the routes to ensure the assumed positive socio-economic impacts associated with BRI are sustainable.
Abstract:The debates on the politics of Chinese engagement with African development have been infused with increasing concern over Chinese use of aid in exchange for preferential energy deals. Normative liberal discourse criticizes the Chinese for disbursing 'rogue aid' and undermining good governance in the African continent. These criticisms not only ignore the longer term motivations and modalities of Chinese aid and the historical diversity of Chinese relations with Africa, but also uncritically assumes 'Western' aid to be morally 'better' and 'more effective' in terms of development outcomes. There are three parts to this paper. First, it will discuss the emerging debates surrounding Chinese engagement in Africa, especially around aid and development issues. Second, the paper maps the historical development of China-Africa engagement and investigates the impacts of the changing modalities of Chinese aid in two case study countries: Angola and Ghana. We then conclude with a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences between these two cases. Our principal argument is that different ideologies and practices of governance are used by both the Chinese and the western donors to conceal their own interests and political discourses in the African continent.
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