Webinar: Launch of report on Decision-making on Belt and Road projects: what role for sustainability?

Speakers: Chuyu Liu, Thomas Hale, Johannes Urpelainen

Chinese overseas investment associated with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has predominantly flowed into fossil fuels and other forms of high-carbon infrastructure across the developing countries. While a growing number of voluntary standards and networks seek to “green” the BRI, it is not yet clear how these will influence the decisions and incentives of key actors in China and recipient countries developing BRI-related projects. A new report from ISEP at Johns Hopkins University, the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, and the ClimateWorks Foundation seeks to better understand how sustainability considerations do and do not enter into decision-making around BRI projects. The report is based on in-depth elite interviews with regulatory agencies, policy banks, NGOs, and state-owned enterprises in China, and seeks to unpack BRI’s decision-making processes by revealing divergent preferences, incentives, and bureaucratic capacity of various related actors. Policy recommendations on how to green the BRI are made based on these findings. The webinar will present the report’s key findings and provide a forum to discuss their implications with key stakeholders.

To attend the Webinar, register here.

Keynote Speakers:

Chuyu Liu is a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He concentrates on ethnic conflict, the political economy of development, and East Asian security. He obtained his doctorate in Political Science from the Pennsylvania State University.  His current research analyzes political economy of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. His research is published or forthcoming in Energy Policy, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Comparative Economics, Journal of East Asian Studies, Security Studies, and The China Review.

Dr. Thomas Hale’s research explores how we can manage transnational problems effectively and fairly. He seeks to explain how political institutions evolve–or not–to face the challenges raised by globalization and interdependence, with a particular emphasis on environmental and economic issues. He holds a PhD in Politics from Princeton University, a masters degree in Global Politics from the London School of Economics, and an AB in public policy from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. A US national, Hale has studied and worked in Argentina, China, and Europe. His books include Beyond Gridlock (Polity 2017), Between Interests and Law: The Politics of Transnational Commercial Disputes (Cambridge 2015), Transnational Climate Change Governance (Cambridge 2014), and Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing when We Need It Most (Polity 2013).

Johannes Urpelainen is the Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Professor of Energy, Resources and Environment (ERE) at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is also the Director of the ERE Program and the Founding Director of the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy (ISEP). Professor Urpelainen develops and tests sustainable solutions to the problem of lacking energy access in emerging economies. His research with ISEP, a groundbreaking research initiative on sustainable energy policy, offers pragmatic but effective approaches to providing the world’s population with affordable and abundant energy at minimal environmental impact.