Paper short abstract:

Heterogeneous configurations shape infrastructure development in Africa. Through the narration and analysis of a Chinese project in Ghana, the paper aims to bring to light and investigate conformations and implications of heterogeneous actor configurations hidden behind projects labelled as Chinese.

Paper long abstract:

“Is it really about China?” asks Gagliardone (2019) in one of the last chapters of his book China, Africa, and the Future of the Internet, which investigates whether and how China is influencing the shaping of information societies in Africa. The same question can be asked regarding China's presence in African infrastructure development. The answer will probably be the same: no, or better, not only. As observed during the thirteen months of fieldwork research conducted between October 2021 and December 2022 with Chinese and non-Chinese actors involved in infrastructure projects in Ghana, heterogeneous configurations characterize (large-scale) infrastructure projects in Africa. These configurations represent a discontinuity with the past and show the emergence of new dynamics among the actors involved.

In presenting the history and implications of a Chinese-financed and built project involving the construction of twelve fishing ports along the Ghanaian coast, I will ask the same question.

Through the narration of the project, I will illustrate heterogeneous configurations and discuss how central and local government elites’ interests, “African agency”, foreign states, and companies’ business influence infrastructure development projects in Africa.

The purpose is not so much about acquitting China (or the Chinese state-owned company) for the consequences of the realisation, and failure, of a project. Rather, it is about showing how heterogeneous actor configurations, private interests, and power dynamics hide behind the label of a project as “Chinese”.

The aim is to analyse infrastructure projects not only as material objects but also as traces of wider global heterogeneous configurations.