Governance for Good: The Competitors for Worldwide Access are Challenging or Overlapping the Purpose of Belt and Road Initiative?

Since being launched in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has caught attention across the globe, prompting the United States and other countries to counter with their own bilateral/plurilateral infrastructural and connectivity initiatives. These initiatives appear to seek to rejuvenate their bygone superpower days as well as to counteract the BRI. Among these initiatives are the G7’s Build Back Better World (B3W, rebranded as the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII) in 2022), the EU’s Global Gateway, and the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor (AAGC). The BRI is China’s vision of several land roads, three sea routes and a number of non-material corridors. In 2021, China also launched the Initiative for Belt and Road Partnership on Green Development (“BRI Green Partnership”) with an emphasis on green, sustainable international collaborations and low-carbon transition that tied into the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement. In contrast, the other initiatives highlight the high quality, transparency and sustainable development of their infrastructural projects. Moreover, unlike the BRI which is funded mainly by state-owned banks, the other initiatives’ programs leverage public development finance to mobilize untapped private-sector funds. What is the difference and the possible synergy among those initiatives? How should these initiatives be positioned to promote global governance of infrastructure projects? This chapter analyzes the similarities as well as differences (and possible synergy) among these initiatives in terms of their principles, plans, goals and models of participation. Based on the concepts of strategic competition and cooperation, we argue that the BRI and the other initiatives share some common content with different areas of focus and competing strategies on the global scale, but that these other initiatives are relatively fragmented, characterized by overlapping collaborative initiatives in addition to traditional bilateral efforts by governments and multi-laterals led by international financial institutions. The main conclusion thus emerges is the urgency of meaningful governance-cooperation among the initiatives in order to build a more inter-connected world and to promote a global service system.