The Boston University Global Development Policy Center is pleased to partner with The China Global South Project to provide a weekly column on the latest research and analysis of our Global China Initiative (GCI). You may be most familiar with our five open-source interactive databases tracking China’s overseas lending and investment in various sectors and regions – but we do more than collect and share data!
GCI has three research programs that examine various aspects of China’s overseas development activities. Informed by our databases but also bringing in novel analysis from fieldwork, spatial mapping, economic and environmental modeling, and more, these three groups aim to provide evidence-based, non-partisan research to a wide audience.
The Energy and Climate program focuses on China’s overseas energy projects and their implications for global climate change and other environmental issues. Drawing from trends in our two energy-related databases – the China’s Global Energy Finance Database and the China’s Global Power Database – we explore the determinants of China’s overseas energy finance, especially how and why financial support flows to certain types of energy in certain countries. We also conduct peer-reviewed research on the impacts of China’s overseas energy projects in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, local air pollution, and physical climate risks.
The Forestry, Agriculture, Indigenous Rights, and the Belt and Road Initiative (FAIR-BRI) program examines how the BRI impacts land use, biodiversity, and natural resources critical for Indigenous communities worldwide. Our flagship database, the China’s Overseas Development Finance Database, provides geolocated data on projects with finance from China’s development banks and their overlap with Indigenous people’s lands, protected areas, and critical habitats. Moving from data to policy, we work with partners in the Andean Amazon and Indonesia to explore ways Chinese development finance institutions can mitigate social and environmental risks. Last year, we published a study in Science examining the potential for debt-for-nature and debt-for-climate swaps between China and indebted countries, with a data interactive showing where swaps could maximize economic and environmental benefits.
Finally, our China and the International Economic Order program takes a comparative approach to evaluating how Chinese development finance institutions engage with other international financial institutions, focusing on identifying policy channels for cooperation towards more sustainable, development-oriented global economic governance. Recent research has compared and contrasted emergency lending from China versus the International Monetary Fund, the sources of China’s vision for global economic governance, and evaluated a proposal for a “Shanghai Model” of sovereign debt restructuring.
In addition to our databases and research programs, we support a cohort of pre-and post-doctoral researchers through our GCI Fellows program, which recruits on an annual basis. We also host a regular Research Colloquium series, with exciting events planned for this spring spanning all our research topics.
We look forward to contributing this regular column to The China Global South Project and providing you with the very latest from our databases, research and policy commentary.
Cecilia Han Springer is the Assistant Director, Global China Initiative at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center.
