Managing the Belt and Road: Agency and development in Cambodia and Myanmar

Discussions on Chinese-financed and Chinese-built infrastructure projects, and more recently about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), are often focused on China and fail to consider the role of the countries hosting these projects. Yet, host countries' dynamics are crucial to shaping the outcomes of BRI projects. This study investigates how the governments of developing countries in Southeast Asia leverage the BRI to achieve their own objectives. Through episode analysis based on literature and interviews conducted in Cambodia and Myanmar, we study the strategies deployed by these governments to influence the development of the BRI. We show that Cambodia uses strategies based on the principle of diversification, spreading infrastructure financing and implementation among a growing number of partners. We then show that the Myanmar government relies on impartiality to implement the proposed infrastructure projects and mitigate their risks. We link these strategies to the domestic contexts of Cambodia and Myanmar, discussing how these respond to the political setup of each country. This has important implications in terms of the narrative on the BRI, as it highlights the role of host country governments and of the domestic context in shaping outcomes. Our study fills a gap in the literature by providing a cross-country framework to understand how agency is deployed to achieve the desired outcomes in the context of the BRI, and more in general of infrastructure planning and implementation.