India’s Infrastructure Building In Africa: South-South Cooperation And The Abstraction Of Responsibility
通过卢旺达尼亚巴龙戈水坝的案例，研究印度对非基础设施融资，揭示21世纪南南合作脱离政治纲领、窄化为国家间合作，导致责任缺失和问责边缘化。
Abstract A growing debate concerns the developmental implications of booming relations between ‘Southern’ powers and countries across Africa. Whilst mainstream commentary worries about nefarious influences, others explore supposedly increasing ‘African agency’, a term capturing the ability of African states to define their international relations. South-South Cooperation, given its supposed principles asserting sovereignty, non-interventionism, and demand-led projects, is understood to boost such agency. This article analyses such claims with a detailed case study of Indian governmental infrastructure financing in Africa, the Nyabarongo Dam in Rwanda, filling a significant gap concerning under-researched India–Africa relations. Originally, South-South cooperation was rooted in a programme that combined technical cooperation with a radical political critique of global power and a call for reform. However, this study of India’s concessional finance suggests that in its twenty-first century manifestation, South-South Cooperation is often decoupled from a political programme, leaving only open-ended, depoliticized state-to-state cooperation initiatives. The article demonstrates that whilst India’s development cooperation generated useful opportunities, it acted to empower companies and exacerbated the Rwandan state’s structural regulatory weaknesses. The article traces this to the policymaking practices of India’s development cooperation, showing that a decoupling of political ambitions results in a narrow state-to-state focus with an abdication of responsibility for development outcomes, marginalizing accountability to average African citizens.