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Paper short abstract

The “Wall Street consensus” development finance paradigm combines modernist “big push” infrastructure development with neoliberal desire for foreign investment. European sustainable investment funds and Guinean rural elites alike use these state created opportunities for private enrichment.

Paper long abstract

“How to make money and contribute to the development of Africa?” This was the opening line during an “Africa Finance Breakfasts” series event at Jones Day in Paris in May 2019. The financers, lawyers and development experts present there that morning were involved with the most recent but now defunct wave of development finance—the Wall Street Consensus. Having come to being with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (2015) and the rise of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria in international finance, the so-called ESG boom, the Wall Street Consensus sought to use Global North portfolio glut to finance green development projects in the Global South with de-risking mechanisms provided by the destination countries and development banks.

However, dreams of attaining industrial modernity by mobilizing foreign investment are regularly touted by diverse African parties alike. This presentation contrasts and compares the Wall Street consensus sustainable investment vision from one of the key French sustainable investment funds with a marabout-led coalition in rural Guinea seeking to attract and orchestrate foreign capital for infrastructure development in their village.

This presentation summarizes what the moral economy of development came to look like in the 2010s and early 2020s. The neoliberal credo of state competition for foreign investment was recombined with vintage modernist ideas of development as “big push” industrialization. Unlike liberal and neoliberal promotion of the self-organizing virtues of private greed, in this vision of development, state backing is explicitly used to devise personal enrichment opportunities for international finance and local elites alike.