Pivot to the South: Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals through China's Belt and Road Initiative

Abstract

Whilst China's aid and development model has been traditionally understood as divergent from the dominant post-1945 liberal development model, scholars are also increasingly exploring convergence between features of the two development models. Recently, scholars from a range of disciplines including development studies, development geography and international (business, environment and legal) studies have explored a process whereby China's Belt and Road Initiative and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals converge (‘BRI-SDG integration’). This paper brings these multidisciplinary strands of scholarship together and places them in dialogue with social sciences convergence theory to understand how BRI-SDG integration aligns with or challenges previous conceptualisations of Chinese-dominant development convergence. The paper first demonstrates that BRI-SDG integration proposes a novel and deliberate convergence process - which the paper names ‘complementary convergence’. However, BRI-SDG integration also underscores the need for more multidirectional frameworks that reject Eurocentricity for evaluating the contemporary Chinese-dominant relationship, and an enhanced focus on how China is influencing dominant development institutions. Finally, BRI-SDG integration reiterates the methodological difficulties of delineating between ‘development models’ in an increasingly interrelated global governance of development.