Presentation short abstract

This paper examines dynamics surrounding the rehabilitation and paving of Madagascar’s Route Nationale 5A, a major regional artery linking the island’s northwest and northeast, as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative. How have local residents extracted benefits and imagined associated futures?

Presentation long abstract

In this paper, I examine the social, political, and economic dynamics surrounding the rehabilitation and paving of northern Madagascar’s Route Nationale 5A, a major regional artery linking the island’s northwest and northeast. Undertaken by the China Road and Bridge Corporation as part of China’s global Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the project transformed what was long regarded as one of Madagascar’s worst transportation corridors—where the 160 kilometers between the towns of Ambilobe and Vohemar might take a day or more to travel (when passable at all)—into a sleek and smooth expanse of asphalt passing through the region’s valleys, hills, and well-known goldfields. Drawing on interviews with project managers, laborers, local authorities, and residents from communities along the route as well as years-long ethnographic engagement in the implicated gold mining town of Betsiaka, I trace the ways in which affected community members worked to capture tangible benefits from the road’s construction process: earning wages as laborers, pilfering and reselling materials like cement and fuel, and using associated proceeds to build houses and further productive activities. Moreover, I elucidate the perspectives shared by interlocutors regarding the experienced and expected consequences of the road’s completion vis-à-vis transport, commerce, health, and security, as well as for social, political, and economic dynamics more broadly. In so doing, I aim to uncover how individuals and communities living in the wake of BRI projects understand the undertakings, work to “domesticate” operations and their benefits, and construct imaginaries around potential futures, both desired and feared.

Presentation short abstract

China's increasing engagement and influence have sparked anti-Chinese sentiment and protests in several African countries. By examining the puzzling case of Guinea, we argue that the key to understanding the occurrence of anti-China protests lies in the political economy of China's presence.

Presentation long abstract

As China's engagement in Africa is growing, so is anti-Chinese suspicion and protest against Chinese influence. In our paper, we examine the circumstances that lead to anti-China protest. Previous studies found that these protests occur depending on the scale of China's economic influence, the regime type, and efforts of political instrumentalization. To elaborate on these theories, we study the striking case of Guinea. While the country has been a likely case for anti-China protest, based on the prevailing theories, such protest has been very rare. We therefore examine Chinese actors and the local responses in Guinea, especially regarding the bauxite mining regions, by drawing on protest event data and interviews. Refining political economy explanations, we show that anti-China protests depend less on the scale of Chinese investment than previously assumed. What matters, we argue, are corporate practices and the integration of Chinese actors into the domestic political economy. In Guinea, there has been no anti-China backlash due to high economic dependence on Chinese companies as well as cooptation through their CSR programs and Guinea’s mining regime. We conclude by suggesting that this argument could be relevant beyond the Guinean case to explain the occurrence and absence of anti-China protests.

Presentation short abstract

China’s expanding waste-to-energy sector has shifted from a domestic fix to a geopolitical instrument. This study examines how WTE became a state-selected regime and how its localization in the Global South reshapes financial logics, state spatial strategies, and infrastructural power.

Presentation long abstract

Over the past decade, China’s waste-to-energy (WTE) sector has emerged as a key frontier in the outward reach of its developmental state. Initially introduced in the 2000s to address the domestic waste crisis, WTE has since been reframed as a global project through national renewable-energy programs, policy-bank green financing, and diplomatic platforms such as the Green Belt and Road. Departing from the European model dominated by privatized operators such as Veolia and Suez, this study adopts a geopolitical ecology approach to argue that China-led waste-infrastructure frontiers are no longer merely profit-driven but function as instruments of state-building and geopolitical restructuring. Drawing on historical-institutional lens and spatial analysis of several Chinese WTE investment projects, the research asks: (1) why and how WTE has become a strategically selected technological regime of the Chinese state, from domestic municipal investment to global expansion; and (2) what new financial rationalities, state spatial strategies, and power relations emerge through its localization, especially across rapidly urbanizing regions in the Global South. The rise of WTE not only drives a shift from labor-intensive local waste disposal to capital-intensive mega-infrastructure implemented through more authoritarian, state-centered, and technocratic modalities, but also positions China’s infrastructural ideologies as active participants in global struggles over the definition of green technology. These controversies intensify as the EU questions WTE’s green classification, countries such as the UK and Australia revive WTE investment in strategic response to China, and anti-incineration movements in Southeast Asia mobilize against China-financed projects.

Presentation short abstract

This collective article examines China-G7 competition in leading green infrastructure development by comparing the Lobito Corridor and the Tazara Railway projects. It argues that this competition offers host countries and local actors leverage points for upholding just transition claims.

Presentation long abstract

This collective article examines China-G7 competition in leading green infrastructure projects in the Global South, particularly its impact on a globally just transition. We compare the G7-led Lobito Corridor and China-led Tazara Railway projects, which similarly aim to unlock the critical minerals necessary to sustain the energy transition in exchange for investment in local infrastructure, but exhibit different development finance models and adherence to environmental justice norms. While China relies on state directives, state-owned enterprises, and policy banks, the G7 enlists governments and international institutions in underwriting risks for private and institutional investors. Based on a close examination of project documents, policy reports, and interviews with experts, we argue that the competition between these models offers host countries and local actors leverage points to rebalance foreign investors’ priorities in favor of local needs for development and environmental stewardship, potentially countering neo-colonial extractive trends and building pathways to a globally just transition.

Co-authors include: Andrew Cheon, Erika Weinthal, Paula Ganga, Dorothy Song, Wumeng He, Jennifer Turner, Loren Risi, and Hyeyoon Park.

Presentation short abstract

This paper analyzes China’s growing influence over Southeast Asia’s cross-border electricity grid. It examines two avenues of influence: China's engagement with ASEAN policymakers, and China's operation of transmission lines in Laos.

Presentation long abstract

This paper analyzes China’s growing influence over Southeast Asia’s evolving energy infrastructure, particularly in the development of a fully integrated, cross-border electricity grid. ASEAN has long pursued regional grid integration as a means of enhancing energy security, improving efficiency, and facilitating the transition to renewable energy. Recently, this goal has gained new momentum as countries seek to link areas rich in renewable resources, such as hydropower in Laos and solar potential in Cambodia, with major demand centers in industrialized nations like Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore. However, while regional energy integration is framed as a step toward sustainability, the structure and governance of this emerging grid raise important geopolitical concerns - particularly regarding China’s outsized role in shaping its development.

China, with its own vast and technologically advanced power network, is playing a central role in ASEAN’s grid ambitions by providing both technical expertise and financial backing. This paper examines two primary avenues through which China exerts influence: first, through the Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization’s engagement with ASEAN policymakers; and second, through the China Southern Power Grid’s acquisition of Laos’ national transmission assets. Preliminary findings suggest that China’s involvement is facilitating the development of large-scale energy projects geared toward export, particularly hydropower, in which Chinese firms are key investors. However, the long-term benefits of this model for Southeast Asian host countries remain uncertain, raising questions about energy sovereignty, financial dependency, and the balance between regional sustainability goals and China’s strategic interests.

Presentation short abstract

China–Brazil soy–meat trade drives major socio-environmental pressures. Using policy analysis and recent interviews, we assess whether China’s emerging green ambitions can foster a just transition in Brazil or reproduce extractive dynamics within Global China’s political ecologies

Presentation long abstract

China’s expanding demand for agro-commodities now constitutes one of the strongest drivers of global food-system pressures, led by soybeans, beef, dairy, forest products, and fruits. These trade flows shape social-environmental impacts in sending systems like Brazil. A 2025 Lancet Commission identified how the global food system is intertwined with all nine planetary boundaries (five already transgressed) and social foundations such as workers’ rights, agency, and equity. Despite China’s centrality in these dynamics, little research has examined how the telecoupled relations between Brazil and China may advance or hinder socio-ecological transitions. We address this gap using policy analysis, recent interview data from Brazilian and European agri-food stakeholders, and recent literature on telecoupling. We critically assess whether China’s emerging sustainability ambitions in biofertilizers, bio-technologies, green finance and deforestation-free sourcing contribute to a just transition in Brazil’s agricultural sector. We focus on the telecoupled soy-meat complex in Brazil-China trade because of (1) the major social-environmental externalities produced along this chain; (2) the technical and political strategies currently being discussed to address them, including bioinput cooperation, changes in trade rules, differential financing for agroecology and family farming, and the expanding influence of both the EU- and China-led regulatory regimes. We argue that China’s evolving environmental governance under Ecological Civilization creates new opportunities for transforming the soy-meat complex, but also risks reproducing extractive and neo-colonial relations. By situating these dynamics within the political ecologies of Global China, we engage with contested possibilities for aligning telecoupled agri-food trade with climate, biodiversity, and social justice goals.

Presentation short abstract

China promotes itself as an environmental global leader, particularly in tackling desertification. This paper analyses China's model of desertification control, and identifies the challenges that China faces in exporting key elements of this model overseas.

Presentation long abstract

China has in recent years begun to position itself as a global environmental leader. This is particularly evident in the case of desertification: China has been establishing cooperative relations in the field of desertification prevention and control with countries from Mongolia to Mauritania. This cooperation is presented as the transfer of Chinese expertise and experience, with official media proclaiming a China’s ‘global model for desertification control’. In this paper, we analyse China’s attempts to control desertification domestically in order to disaggregate this Chinese ‘model’. Drawing on our own research on Chinese cooperation in Mongolia and the Sahel, we to argue that only certain elements of China’s domestic experience are being exported overseas. This points to a broader dilemma for China’s global environmental leadership, namely the tension between its foreign policy principle of non-intervention, and the large-scale socioecological engineering that defines its domestic model of environmental governance.

Presentation short abstract

China’s “new-era marine development vision” reshapes human-ocean relations through marine restoration. Examining its practices in Southeast Asia, this article shows how China’s cosmological worldmaking intersects with technoscientific and geopolitical strategies.

Presentation long abstract

Marine restoration as a worldmaking practice has historically been shaped by Western ontologies and governance paradigms. Yet China has recently emerged as an active actor, advancing its cosmological “new-era marine development vision” (新时代海洋发展观), centered on the principles of marine ecological civilization and a shared future for a marine community. This article examines how this vision reconfigures the ontological foundations of human-ocean relations and how marine restoration serves as a site of ontological politics through which Global China is enacted. Focusing on China’s regional engagements in Southeast Asia, we argue that China’s marine worldmaking operates simultaneously as a cosmological project and a geopolitical strategy. On one hand, it opens possibilities for alternative worldmaking, where ecological restoration becomes a relational and co-constitutive process that redefines human-nature entanglements. On the other hand, it embeds technoscientific and geopolitical rationalities that extend China’s governance models and normative influence in global ocean governance. By tracing how cosmological framings intersect with technoscientific and geopolitical practices, this article contributes to debates on marine restoration as a material, cosmological, and political worldmaking process, and situates Global China as an emergent, relational, and unfinished formation oriented toward a self-proclaimed “plural” future.

Presentation short abstract

This article examines how China links energy access to a global just transition, drawing on its domestic legacy and solar projects in Namibia and Laos. We show how “small and beautiful” projects can expand access yet reproduce inequities, shaping China’s emerging vision of a just transition.

Presentation long abstract

Energy access is an essential yet often overlooked aspect of a just global energy transition. China is often portrayed as a model of domestic ‘green’ energy access, having achieved universal electrification and become the world’s leading low-carbon energy producer. Increasingly, low-carbon technologies from China are exported to facilitate energy transitions abroad. While these exports are often examined through the lens of supply chain dominance, they have been accompanied by a broader policy shift from large, export-oriented infrastructure toward “small and beautiful” projects, suggesting a reorientation toward localized benefits. This article assesses the implications of these changes for a just transition by examining the role of energy access in China’s evolving understandings of a just transition and in its overseas low-carbon investments. More specifically, we draw on historical examination of China’s domestic lineages of energy access and qualitative research on Chinese solar projects in Namibia and Laos to analyze how Chinese actors conceptualize both domestic and international energy access in relation to questions of justice and with what implications for host communities. Our findings suggest that “small and beautiful” projects hold the potential to enhance local energy access, but they may also reproduce varied forms of injustice depending on local and institutional factors. The research contributes to broader debates on China’s role in a just transition by demonstrating how contextualized understandings of energy access have come to shape China’s domestic and foreign approaches to a just transition, with implications for the pursuit of a global just transition.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how China’s rise as a leader in green automotive technology reshapes core–periphery relations. Using cases from Mexico, Poland, Canada, and Austria, we analyze government and firm strategies amid new opportunities and geopolitical tensions.

Presentation long abstract

China’s expanding role in global socio-economic development, particularly in green technology, has sparked polarized debates in political economy. Existing literature tends to frame Chinese investment as either enabling development in peripheral countries or threatening established core–periphery power relations. This paper argues that China’s impact is more complex, operating simultaneously as both enabler and disruptor in core and peripheral contexts.

Focusing on the automotive sector - especially electric vehicles (EV) - as a crucial case, we examine how China’s evolving position as a global leader in green technology reshapes established dependency dynamics. Specifically, we ask: How do peripheral and semi-peripheral economies, historically confined to low- and mid-value positions within global supply chains, respond to these shifting dynamics, and to what extent can they leverage them for upgrading?

We compare how automotive industries in Mexico and Poland, deeply integrated with U.S. and German OEMs respectively, adapt to China’s rise, alongside cases of Canada and Austria as core suppliers to these OEMs. This comparative approach enables us to disentangle the strategies of countries with and without domestic OEMs, revealing tensions between new opportunities from Chinese foreign direct investment and risks from potential sanctions and exclusion pressures by core economies.

Methodologically, we combine documentary analysis, secondary data, and expert interviews to map government and firm tactics for navigating this emerging landscape of uncertainty and co-dependence. Our findings contribute to debates in development studies and international political economy by offering a nuanced account of how China’s green technology leadership transforms existing global hierarchies.