India’s Infrastructure Building In Africa

South-South Cooperation And The Abstraction Of Responsibility

Bibliographic Data

ID6026252
AuthorsBarnaby Dye (0000-0001-5105-1973, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume121
Issue483
Pages221-249
Publication date2022-05-16
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican Affairs (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0001-9909 • E-ISSN: 1468-2621
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/afraf/adac013
OpenAlexW4225884685
LanguageEN
Citations received9

A growing debate concerns the developmental implications of booming relations between ‘Southern’ powers and countries across Africa. Whilst mainstream commentary worries about nefarious influences, others explore supposedly increasing ‘African agency’, a term capturing the ability of African states to define their international relations. South-South Cooperation, given its supposed principles asserting sovereignty, non-interventionism, and demand-led projects, is understood to boost such agency. This article analyses such claims with a detailed case study of Indian governmental infrastructure financing in Africa, the Nyabarongo Dam in Rwanda, filling a significant gap concerning under-researched India–Africa relations. Originally, South-South cooperation was rooted in a programme that combined technical cooperation with a radical political critique of global power and a call for reform. However, this study of India’s concessional finance suggests that in its twenty-first century manifestation, South-South Cooperation is often decoupled from a political programme, leaving only open-ended, depoliticized state-to-state cooperation initiatives. The article demonstrates that whilst India’s development cooperation generated useful opportunities, it acted to empower companies and exacerbated the Rwandan state’s structural regulatory weaknesses. The article traces this to the policymaking practices of India’s development cooperation, showing that a decoupling of political ambitions results in a narrow state-to-state focus with an abdication of responsibility for development outcomes, marginalizing accountability to average African citizens

Accountability · Agency (philosophy) · Development economics · Economic growth · Economics · Mainstream · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Sovereignty · State (computer science) · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · International Development and Aid · Law · Public Administration

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access