Despite seemingly coming from the same naming tradition that gave us Melania Trump’s Be Best campaign, the Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative is firmly pointed away from the recent past. It seems driven by a new willingness to face the many barriers that shape our current system.
As articulated by Gregory W. Meeks, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the B3W is a flurry of good intentions, littered with ‘should’ and ‘must.’ The U.S. and its allies are exhorted to not only to narrow the Global South’s $40 trillion infrastructure investment gap (already a tall order) but also to ‘mobilize their collective ability to spur private investment,’ to ‘emphasize and demand transparency and high standards,’ to push ‘for a common set of standards across the major multilateral institutions and development banks’ and to support ‘developing countries in implementing transparency and good governance mechanisms’ in infrastructure (and trade, to boot.) If that’s not enough, they’re also invited to ‘rethink what infrastructure looks like in today’s world.’
This is quite the to-do list. I’m left echoing Francesca Ghiretti’s recent argument in The Diplomat that B3W seems already to be falling into the same trap as the BRI: over-promising.
More specifically, B3W seems to live in a specifically Western comfort zone: Shouldville. This futuristic hamlet is defined by seemingly having already made all the correct moves somewhere in the past, which means it now enjoys perpetual environmental sustainability and social equity. It sure looks like a nice place to live – something between Denmark and the floating space station in the Neil Blomkamp movie Elysium.
Bluntly put: B3W proponents still have to prove that all their high standards won’t be used as a velvet rope to keep the majority of Global South countries out. Raise all the criticism you want, but this is a test the BRI has already passed.
It’s less clear how the residents of Shouldville got to this happy state. The road from the Global South to Shouldville is (like many B3W infrastructure projects) still TBC. Even getting there from many parts of the U.S. seems like quite a trek. In other words, how the B3W allies are going to get all these private investors, international partners and Global South governments to play ball remains tantalizingly unsaid.
For all the BRI’s own fabulist tendencies, it also based its global expansion on certain practical mechanisms. These included the preexistence of massive infrastructure contracting and financing sectors used to working together and hungry for international experience, a set of shared understandings with Global South governments and a default institutionalization of secrecy that covered a multitude of lapses.
These didn’t always deliver the best outcomes on the ground, but at least there were outcomes. The B3W’s commitment to better outcomes is laudable, but its champions should keep one reality in mind: the fact that Western lenders’ insistence on the highest transparency, environmental and social standards has also frequently functioned as the excuse (whether real or a pretext) for not delivering projects at all. This has been feature of the Global South’s interaction with the Global North for decades – it is the ‘strings attached’ many African governments cite when they explain their reasons for working with China in the first place.
Finding a way from the B3W’s many ‘shoulds’ to an actual organic working relationship, one where the U.S. and its allies can be something more than compliance monitors, will be one of its biggest challenges, one I haven’t seen addressed in detail so far.
Bluntly put: B3W proponents still have to prove that all their high standards won’t be used as a velvet rope to keep the majority of Global South countries out. Raise all the criticism you want, but this is a test the BRI has already passed.
