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Paper short abstract

Resource-backed borrowing ties sovereign finance to future oil revenues. Using African oil exporters, this study shows that RBL exposure amplifies pro-cyclical fiscal adjustment during price shocks and weakens policy space, underscoring the need for stronger disclosure and transparency reforms.

Paper long abstract

Resource-backed borrowing links sovereign finance to future commodity revenues through export prepayment, repayment-in-kind, and collateral/escrow arrangements. This paper examines how these structures reshape policy space in oil-dependent African borrowers, focusing on Nigeria, Angola, Chad, and the Republic of Congo. Building on the World Bank’s publicly identified set of 30 resource-backed loans in Sub-Saharan Africa (2004–2018), we extend the inventory with more recent publicly reported crude-backed facilities and restructuring episodes, including Nigeria’s large crude-oil prepayment facility and Angola’s renegotiated repayment mechanics.

Empirically, we combine (i) a sector/country mapping of RBL structures (repayment channel, tenor, offtaker/lender type) with (ii) an event-study around negative oil-price shocks using IMF commodity prices and export/fiscal series (UN Comtrade; IMF WEO/IFS). We test whether RBL reliance is associated with sharper pro-cyclical adjustment, measured by changes in capital spending, social spending proxies, arrears, and reserve drawdowns relative to non-RBL peers. We then process-trace how opacity and earmarked repayment channels alter bargaining dynamics during downturns and restructurings. The paper concludes with actionable reforms: minimum disclosure of repayment formulas/escrow balances, stress-testing clauses, and harmonized transparency standards for creditor coordination.

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Paper short abstract

This paper traces who bears the "cost" of development in multipolar finance. Comparing three AIIB models in Southeast Asia, it argues that while co-financing makes states fund compliance, standalone AIIB lending shifts costs to women in the informal economy via tenure exclusion and livelihood loss.

Paper long abstract

The rise of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) allows borrowing states to arbitrate between the price of capital and the cost of governance. When gender safeguards are negotiated across lenders, who pays for compliance? I conceptualize safeguard implementation as a distributive problem in which administrative costs of safeguards can be internalized by the state or externalized as “social debt” borne by affected communities.

Using comparative process-tracing of three AIIB-financed infrastructure initiatives in Indonesia and the Philippines, the paper identifies three models of cost distribution for gender safeguards. First, the Bataan–Cavite Bridge in the Philippines illustrates a Convergence model: AIIB co-finances with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and harmonizes safeguards, while the Philippine state accepts high administrative costs. Second, the Mandalika Tourism Zone in Indonesia demonstrates a Divergence model: AIIB lends on a standalone basis and relies heavily on national systems. Because these systems do not recognize informal and customary tenure, the state reduces administrative burdens while shifting the costs onto indigenous and informal-sector women through dispossession, lost livelihoods, and increased unpaid care work. Third, Indonesia’s KOTAKU urban upgrading program exemplifies a Cumulative model: multi-donor financing produces layered requirements and “normative lock-in,” compelling the state to build an expansive and participatory bureaucracy as the price of accessing larger-scale MDB capital.

Taken together, the comparison complicates simple “race-to-the-bottom” claims. In a multipolar financing environment, borrower agency is exercised less through escaping conditionality than through the redistribution of governance costs within the state apparatus or on affected communities.

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Paper short abstract

We examine how development aid influences public expenditure choices at the subnational level in India during the 1978-2019 period. Using an excludable instrument, we find that development aid is associated with a diversion of government spending on capital expenditure to revenue expenditure.

Paper long abstract

The question of whether aid supplements or substitutes domestic spending has long been debated in public finance literature. Using a panel covering 30 Indian states during the 1978-2019 period (42 years), we examine how development aid influences public expenditure choices at the subnational level. To address potential endogeneity, we employ an excludable instrumental variable strategy. Our results reveal that development aid is associated with a decline in capital expenditure while simultaneously increasing revenue expenditure. This pattern indicates a substitution effect rather than complementary. The state governments may interpret aid inflows as a replacement rather than a supplement to their own development spending. In practical terms, capital expenditure that might have been allocated to long-term infrastructure, public works, or other capital-intensive projects appear instead to be diverted toward recurrent expenditures.

Furthermore, we also examine the role of political incentives. Using an interaction model, we find that the positive effect of development aid on capital expenditure is conditional upon electoral competition. Specifically, in states characterized by more competitive electoral environment, governments are more likely to channel aid into visible capital projects, consistent with theories linking political competition to public goods provision. Overall, the findings demonstrate that aid can lead to a diversion of government capital expenditure to revenue expenditure. This shift can have long-term implications for economic growth, sustainability, and social equality. However, its effectiveness is also shaped by political context, with electoral incentives mediating whether aid supports sustainable capital investment.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines why crisis-ridden countries avoid default in a multipolar financial system. Using Argentina and Venezuela, it shows how China’s state-led finance reshapes debt negotiations and policy space through a new form of composed structural power.

Paper long abstract

Despite recurrent debt crises and deep socioeconomic distress, sovereign defaults have become increasingly rare in the contemporary global economy. This paper examines why crisis-ridden developing countries continue to service external debt even when traditional enforcement mechanisms associated with the structural power of finance weaken. It focuses on two cases—Venezuela (2013–2018) and Argentina (2019–2023)—both of which experienced severe crises yet persistently averted default.

Drawing on comparative qualitative analysis and process tracing, the paper shows that the three mechanisms commonly identified in the literature—creditor coordination, the influence of domestic financial elites, and the unifying role of lenders of last resort—broke down in both cases. Nevertheless, repayment continued. To explain this puzzle, the paper advances the concept of composed structural power, arguing that China’s rise as a state-led global creditor has reshaped how financial power operates in a multipolar system.

Chinese finance introduces state-permeated and relatively patient capital through instruments such as currency swaps, collateralized lending, and emergency liquidity support. These mechanisms allow governments to manage liquidity crises and sustain debt servicing while postponing restructuring and preserving asymmetric creditor–debtor relations. As a result, policy space is temporarily expanded but structurally constrained over the medium term.

The paper concludes that China’s financial expansion has hybridized the global debt regime rather than transformed it, reinforcing debt dependence through new state-to-state channels. These findings contribute to debates on development finance, sovereign debt governance, and the equity implications of an evolving multipolar financial order.

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Paper short abstract

Africa faces prolonged uncertainty as climate shocks, economic pressure, political change and rapid technology reshape lives and governance. This paper shows how power shapes choices, how Africans act with agency, and calls for fair partnerships that widen policy space.

Paper long abstract

Africa is experiencing a period of deep and sustained uncertainty. Climate pressures are disrupting livelihoods and ecosystems, economic instability continues to strain public finances, political change is reshaping governance, and rapid technological advances are transforming societies and markets. Together, these forces have made development planning across the continent more complex and less predictable. In response, this paper rethinks development from an Africa-centred perspective, focusing on how power shapes development choices and how Africans exercise agency to influence outcomes and future pathways. Drawing on a qualitative and interdisciplinary synthesis of recent peer-reviewed studies and credible policy reports published between 2018 and 2024, the paper examines power and agency across three interconnected levels: global, national, and local. The analysis shows that African agency is becoming increasingly visible through policy reforms, community-led initiatives, civic engagement, innovation, and growing regional cooperation, including efforts to deepen trade and economic integration. At the same time, persistent power imbalances continue to influence development governance. Financing arrangements, agenda-setting processes, and dominant knowledge systems often constrain local choice and long-term planning. To address this tension, the paper proposes a conceptual framework linking power structures, African agency, and development futures. The framework highlights feedback effects, showing how development outcomes can either reinforce existing arrangements or create space for institutional change. The paper concludes that reimagining Africa’s development requires partnerships that expand local policy space, strengthen inclusive governance, and support African-led innovation and social protection systems capable of building long-term resilience.

Keywords:

Africa; Agency; Development; Futures; Governance; Power; Sustainability

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Paper short abstract

Using WTO Trade Policy Review reports (2005–2025), I quantify diplomatic-linguistic hedging in Sub-Saharan African trade discourse (modals, uncertainty, conditionals). I compare to matched peers and link hedging to restrictions, reform delays, and discretionary policy space.

Paper long abstract

Trade outcomes depend not only on tariffs and market size but on how states frame commitments. This paper measures “diplomatic hedging” in Sub-Saharan Africa’s trade policy narratives using WTO Trade Policy Review (TPR) documents. We compile a corpus of government and Secretariat reports for selected Sub-Saharan African members (2005–2025) and use computational text analysis to quantify hedging (modal verbs, uncertainty markers, conditional and aspirational phrasing). We benchmark results against matched non-African developing countries and examine within-country change around shocks (commodity price collapses, elections, IMF programs). We then relate hedging intensity to policy signals in TPRs—new trade restrictions, delayed reforms, and discretion-based measures—controlling for income, trade openness, and institutional capacity. We validate the hedging index with hand-coding and show which sectors (agriculture, services, digital trade) exhibit ambiguity. The study identifies narrative patterns that may dilute bargaining credibility and proposes fixes: plain-language commitment templates, translation support, and negotiation briefs with verifiable timelines.

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This paper critically assesses whether multipolar aid enhances equity in Africa or reproduces dependency under new alliances. It argues that donor diversification expands bargaining space but leaves core power asymmetries intact without strong African-led governance.

Paper long abstract

The reconfiguration of global development cooperation toward a multipolar aid order has been widely celebrated as a corrective to the asymmetries of the traditional donor–recipient model. For African states, the expansion of partnerships with emerging actors from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, alongside established Western donors, appears to promise greater policy autonomy, financing options, and strategic leverage. This paper adopts a critical political economy approach to interrogate whether this shift has meaningfully advanced equity in Africa’s development partnerships or simply reshaped existing hierarchies of power.

The analysis moves beyond descriptive accounts of donor diversification to examine the structural conditions governing contemporary aid relations, including bargaining power, conditionalities, debt exposure, and agenda-setting authority. Drawing on comparative cases across infrastructure finance, security assistance, and development programming, the paper demonstrates that while multipolarity has widened Africa’s diplomatic and financial space, it has not fundamentally altered the rules through which aid is negotiated and deployed. In several instances, competitive geopolitical interests have intensified fragmentation, weakened accountability, and displaced long-term development priorities.

Innovatively, the paper reframes equity not as a function of the number of available partners, but as an outcome of African agency exercised through institutional capacity, regional coordination, and strategic selectivity. It argues that without robust African-led governance mechanisms, anchored in continental frameworks such as Agenda 2063, multipolar aid risks reproducing dependency in more complex and opaque forms.

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Paper long abstract

This study examines equity and accountability in multipolar development finance, focusing on the role of emerging lenders in reshaping aid governance. Emerging lenders’ financing practices, aid governance structures, transparency standards, and conditionality frameworks are treated as independent variables, while equity outcomes, accountability mechanisms, recipient-country policy autonomy, and domestic institutional responsiveness constitute the dependent variables. Financing practices and governance structures are measured by aid volumes, conditionality levels, and institutional arrangements. Transparency standards are assessed through disclosure indices and reporting practices, while accountability mechanisms are measured by monitoring frameworks and recipient oversight structures. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative design using secondary data from multilateral databases, bilateral agreements, policy documents, and academic literature. Documentary and thematic content analysis are employed to identify patterns in governance practices, accountability structures, and equity outcomes. The study argues that although emerging lenders expand recipient bargaining space and challenge traditional aid hierarchies, gaps in transparency and coordination continue to constrain equitable and accountable outcomes in the evolving multipolar development finance system.