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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.