This chapter introduces the central argument of the book: that China’s 21st- century transition from a “benefactor” to a “banker” has had far-reaching im- pacts in low-income and middle-income countries that are not yet widely understood. Beijing’s growing use of debt rather than aid to bankroll big-ticket infrastructure projects has created new opportunities for developing countries to achieve rapid socioeconomic gains, but it has also introduced major risks, including corruption, conflict, and environmental degradation. Some countries are more effective than others at managing these risks and rewards. This chapter “zooms in” on two countries—Sri Lanka and Tanzania—to illustrate the tension between efficacy and safety confronted by developing countries banking on Chinese development finance. It also provides a roadmap for the rest of the book.

The dataset introduced in this book includes thousands of Chinese government- financed development projects. This chapter begins to analyze these data at the cross-national level and addresses a basic question: Which types of projects does China finance around the world? We provide a detailed overview of the allocation of Chinese development finance based on key variables such as destination countries, flow types (such as grants, loans, technical assistance, debt forgiveness, or sectors). The dataset enables us to distinguish between Chinese-financed aid and debt, and this distinction reveals that China’s donor-to-banker shift occurred in the 2000s following the implementation of the “Going Out” strategy. More generally, this chapter uses our new dataset to demonstrate the value of separating out aid and debt projects and show how different countries have different experiences receiving Chinese projects. In providing readers with an aerial global view of the “known universe” of China’s international development finance projects since 2000, the chapter also situates China’s development finance in the context of that of other major donors.

Chapter 2 describes the enabling environment in which orphanage trafficking occurs. It examines how the utility of the orphan child for aid and development is manipulated for the purpose of the orphanage-trafficking business model in order to profit from donor funding and orphanage tourism. It demonstrates how governments and non-governmental organisations utilise the orphan child as a focal point to increase aid and tourism, leading to a financial dependence on the orphan child. This utility is manipulated and exploited by both governments and non-government organisations to encourage what has been termed an ‘orphan addiction’. This chapter describes the political and social imperatives behind the creation, encouragement and maintenance of the orphan addiction, which in turn drives orphanage tourism and the production of paper orphans. The increasing demand for orphanage tourism creates a demand for the maintenance of an orphan population to visit and volunteer with, which is achieved through orphanage trafficking. Finally, this chapter explains the financial incentives of orphanage trafficking for developing nation governments.

The Conclusion draws together the major contributions that the monograph makes. It recognises orphanage trafficking intersects with child protection, tourism and development and argues for a comprehensive approach to the issue.

This chapter presents the book’s third case study, exploring how state transformation shapes China’s international development financing (DF) policymaking and implementation. DF is often seen as an instrument of economic statecraft, strategically deployed to advance China’s geopolitical interests. Contrarily, we show that authority and policymaking is fragmented and contested among central agencies, producing weak oversight for implementing state-owned enterprises, which have primarily pecuniary motives and scant regard for official Chinese diplomatic goals. DF projects thus emerge not from a ‘top-down’ strategy but in a ‘bottom-up’ way, reflecting the agency of buccaneering SOEs and recipient-country elites. The outcomes of DF projects – and whether they benefit China’s international relations – depend on how the specific interests on both sides intersect, as we show through comparative case studies of hydropower development in Cambodia and Myanmar. In Cambodia, Chinese DF was managed by a dominant-party regime in ways that bolstered its domination, generating warmer ties with Beijing. In Myanmar, however, socio-political fragmentation meant that similar projects exacerbated social conflict and even sparked renewed civil war, prompting a crisis in bilateral relations.

This chapter outlines the NGO sector’s transformation from a vector for traditional ideas of charity, welfare and disaster relief, to the more expansive ‘NGO movement’, equally concerned with matters of human rights, economic equality and global justice, that it became. The emergence of a new generation of aid workers in the late 1960s and early 1970s is at the heart of this narrative. What challenges, the chapter asks, did these individuals pose to how NGOs thought about aid? And how did the sector adapt to these changes? To answer those questions, the chapter explores how left-wing critiques of aid, the influence of intellectuals like Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich and Argentinian economist Raúl Prebisch, and a new emphasis on poverty and inequality in transnational religious circles, converged in a common discourse that placed ‘justice’ (broadly defined). The emphasis on reform in those discussions was key. Ultimately, this story is one of compromise, of how ideas of advocacy and reform were absorbed and rearticulated by the NGO sector.

This chapter examines the lessons of the NGO moment for how we write the history of globalisation. It suggests that we need to think more deeply about the boundaries of the ‘global’, and of where and how ‘global’ narratives are constructed. By looking beyond states and international organisations to NGOs, churches and civil society groups – and, indeed, to the Third World and the experiences of small and middling powers in the West – we can render visible the world system on which ideals such as humanitarianism, human rights, justice and development rested. That process, like the story of post-war globalisation, has three layers. First, the NGO moment helps to illuminate the places (physical, intellectual, and ideological) where globalising ideals were made. Second, it allows us to explore the patterns that underpinned those relationships: the connections between individuals, groups and institutions through which global compassion was constituted. Finally, by tracing how and where NGOs operated, this chapter argues, we gain a much fuller appreciation of how power was distributed in purportedly ‘global’ movements. Taken together, these elements allow us to paint a more nuanced picture of how outwardly ‘global’ ideas were understood, assimilated, rebuffe, and reframed in a variety of social and political contexts.

This chapter sets out three claims about the NGO moment. First, it argues for viewing the history of non-governmental aid in terms of moments of acceleration: bursts of activity that refreshed the sector while carrying with them the baggage of what had come before. While the specific dynamics of the period between Biafra and Live Aid were vital in facilitating the sector’s emergence, the moral frameworks that guided those organisations were equally the product of a much longer formative process. Second, this chapter explains how those dynamics helped non-governmental aid to supplant other forms of compassion in this period to become the dominant expression of popular benevolence towards the Third World. The broad remit of those organisations’ activities not only subsumed ‘aid’ under a single umbrella; its ideological underpinnings gave it an unprecedented justification to intervene anywhere there was suffering in the world. Finally, this chapter suggests that the story of the NGO moment provides us with several lessons for the writing of global history. It argues for describing globalisation as a constructed, context-contingent process that can only be understood as the product of the interactions between individual, organisational, national and supra-national actors.

The Introduction presents the argument, theoretical approach, and methods underpinning the study of aid as migration control in Morocco. I argue that aid marks the rise of a substantially different mode of migration containment, one where power works beyond fast violence, and its disciplinary potential is augmented precisely by its elusiveness. I build on Foucault’s analytic of power to develop a framework that explains the coexistence of fast techniques of bordering with emerging instruments of indirect and elusive rule. I then build on Elizabeth Povinelli’s notion of the ‘quasi-event’ to complicate our understanding of ‘benevolence’, ‘malevolence’, and co-optation into borderwork. I emphasise that the elusiveness of aid makes containment less visible and thus more difficult to resist for the actors orbiting around the aid industry. I compound these different threads of analysis into a discussion about power relations in the governance of the border.

An increasingly popular alternative to traditional aid is a “global public goods” (GPG) approach to reducing poverty and countering other global challenges. Having explained the origins and meaning of the concept, which is based on a rationale derived from welfare economics, I present two specific examples: REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and a global initiative for producing a vaccine against Covid-19. I briefly summarize debates about the merits of a GPG approach and how Scandinavian countries are increasingly adopting it, even though this may result in their level of aid falling, since GPG funding may not count. I conclude that if, as seems likely, many countries are slow to accept the shared responsibility that a GPG approach implies, then the reputation, and perhaps even identity, of the Scandinavian people may nevertheless be enhanced if they establish a position – as they have so far often done – among those in the vanguard.

Having laid out the critical importance of finance to energy transitions, this chapter briefly explores the historical role of finance capital in fuelling energy booms and the growth of the fossil fuel economy, before looking at slow shifts in strategy towards a more de-stabilising role in the face of concerns about un-burnable carbon, fears about the risk of stranded assets, as well as the potential returns to be made from expanding investments in renewable energy. In the section on the political economy of finance, however, this more optimistic reading of the role of finance is nuanced by looking at the practices of finance. Finally, in the section on ecologies of finance, the chapter looks at the circulation and interconnectedness of different forms of finance, in which, despite the fetishisation of private finance, public finance still has a vital role to play in the form of aid, multilateral development bank lending and procurement. It also explores the under-acknowledged challenge for finance of energy systems which will have to restrict supply and demand if they are to be compatible with a sustainable climate future.

This chapter discusses international observers and their efforts to improve the quality of elections. Elections are profoundly performative. They demand an audience, and since the late colonial period that audience has been in part an international one. Generations of political leaders, and civil servants, have sought to emphasise the disciplinary function of elections by reminding the public that “the eyes of the world” are upon them. The institutionalization of international election observation over the last thirty years has turned this gaze back upon the state itself: requiring and expecting behaviour in line with international norms. In the African context, though, international election observation has attracted more criticism than acclaim. We argue that this is because observers face two fundamental problems. The first is that observers’ very presence is part of the state effect of elections, conferring legitimacy, yet observers can only report critical opinions after the fact. This links to a second problem, which is that as observers respond to the numerous pressures they face they risk undermining their own credibility, especially among opposition supporters. Especially where elections have generally failed to deliver political change, this undermines the capacity of observers to encourage citizens and parties to play by the rules of the democratic game.