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China's breakneck economic growth has been accompanied by an expanding development finance agenda. Many have hypothesized that China is undermining the West's drive to promote good governance globally, and in Africa in particular, by predominantly distributing money to poorly governed countries. This paper explores whether the determinants of Chinese development finance in Africa differ from those of Western countries. It finds that Western countries send more development finance than China to better governed African countries—those with lower corruption levels, better democratic outcomes, and a better human rights track record (though only the latter two have a negative relationship with Chinese development finance in absolute terms). This paper also finds that bilateral trade and UN voting alignment have a stronger impact on China's development finance than that of Western countries and that China allocates more development finance than the West to richer and more resource-dependent African countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese mammoth investment projects abroad, and especially those under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) umbrella, are receiving heavy scrutiny in academic and policy circles. However, there is insufficient empirical evidence to evaluate their impact. This paper employs a difference- in-differences approach and a pair of new datasets on government spending and economic activity compiled by the World Bank to examine the local impacts of the Chinese-Pakistan Economic Corridor in Pakistan. It finds that the 2013 announcement of CPEC was accompanied by a disproportionate increase in government spending in CPEC districts. However, in the six years after it was first announced, CPEC has not directly contributed a significant increase in economic activity in the districts along its path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The micropolitics involved in urbanising land is yet to be well illustrated in urban and development studies. With the case of Dahongmen in Beijing, this paper explores the governing techniques for dealing with land transformation to uncover the nature and conduct of the state in weaving together land and urban questions. Recognising the power of discourses in enacting actions, this paper focuses on two performative moments of the state in reassembling land for the urban process, corresponding to social (re)ordering and economic mechanisms respectively. Both moments are critical since new ideas, concepts, and calculative rationales are invented to reassemble land into the intermediator of the urban process, whereby the state renews its identity and authority. The state, seen from the perspective of performativity, is more like a process (with structural effects) where certain utterances are made and repeated to incorporate multiple actors in land assemblages for the urban political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the consequences of the hugely successful expansion of South-South Cooperation since the new millennium. For all the achievements, variations and change over the 1950s-late 1990s, 'SSC 1.0' was characterised by relative neglect within the 'international' development community, and by many orthodox and critical scholars. In the chronological schema of the paper, 'SSC 2.0' refers to the period of remarkable expansion from the early 2000s to the present. The emergence of 'SSC 3.0', I suggest, is currently revealed by a discernible set of shifts driven in large part by the expansionary successes of SSC 2.0, as well as other turns in the global political economy. Three contemporary trends are identified: cooperation narratives that are increasingly 'muscular', nationalistic and pragmatic; difficulties sustaining claims to 'non-interference' in partner countries; and the further erosion of ideational and operational distinctiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing scholarly attention has focussed on how to integrate technology within the Capability Approach (CA), yet without a consistent solution. Some describe technology as a special kind of capability input, but others consider the concept of technology to be fundamentally different from that of an ordinary input. We aim to contribute to the theoretical development of the CA by offering a consistent justification for the explicit inclusion of technology in this framework. We propose that technical objects have a ‘generative’ and a ‘transformative’ dimension through which they enable capabilities directly and affect other inputs in the attainment of valued capabilities. The objects acquire the transformative dimension from the broader technological context, which we propose as a new class of conversion factors. Using the example of mobile phones and their role in healthcare access, we demonstrate that our proposal helps to frame the analysis of the development impact of technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article scrutinises the surge in Chinese-funded road development in Zambia with the help of David Harvey's theory of spatio-temporal fixes. The 'moving out' of Chinese surplus capital and material to Africa has been facilitated by an extensive disbursement of loans and export credits for infrastructure projects. Transcending Harvey's analytical 'imperio-centrism', the article shows that the actualisation of the Chinese infrastructural fix has been contingent upon Zambia's ambitious, debt-financed infrastructure development agenda. Particularities of Chinese loan financing have thereby fostered 'not so public' procurement processes and accelerated Zambia's rapid debt accumulation. As rising debt has imposed structural constraints, the recent shift in the financial governance of road development towards private project finance is analysed with reference to the Lusaka-Ndola dual carriageway. The renaissance of public-private partnerships and the gradual privatisation of Zambian roads signify new rounds of accumulation by dispossession, as the Chinese infrastructural fix enters its next stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]