The rise of new international stakeholders in infrastructure making

Abstract

In the last decade a new globalisation trend has come to the fore: States increasingly invest into infrastructure developments on the territory of other states. The most prominent example is the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) officially launched in 2013. While foreign direct investment (FDIs) into infrastructures are not new, the scale reaches unprecedent levels. What is more, is that these investments form part of broader visions and strategies ranging from national corridors to the global scale. The subsequent dependencies between receiving and giving states are frequently discussed for example in relation to geopolitical ambitions or environmental considerations. Yet, in many projects the influence of foreign states on the concrete implementation activities remains murky: FDIs into infrastructure projects are financed via loans from different financiers and implemented through (state-owned or -controlled) companies. We hypothesis that the implementation of infrastructure projects that are developed ‘at the grace’ of one state in another leads to substantial shifts in power-relations between competent decision-making levels in the receiving state, and ultimately levers out existing planning regulations. We suggest that as a result states become ‘shadow actors’ with somewhat subtle, indirect influence on decision-making processes of another state. In this paper, we thus aim to develop a novel characterisation of foreign states as ‘shadow actors’. Drawing on a literature review and in case studies from the Western Balkans and Western Europe the paper carves out key dynamics, and develops a conceptual framework in view of the new role states occupy in infrastructure making.