The Beijing of It All: Africa’s Development Terms Are No Longer Written in Washington or Brussels

In the period that followed decolonisation, Africa’s development landscape continued to be shaped by Western partnerships. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, this Western-facing architecture took the form of policy conditionality, governance agendas and institutional reform attached to rotating credit agreements. This approach rested, at least in part, on a simple reality: countries in the Global South had limited alternatives for accessing large-scale development financing. At the beginning of…