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.