The commodity boom witnessed the emergence of ambitious developmental projects in Africa. But in its focus on the distribution of power, the extant literature struggles to explain the logic driving observed development strategies. To fill this gap, this article provides the first comprehensive study of the Zona Económica Especial de Luanda-Bengo, Angola’s main industrial project of the post-civil war era. Built at a cost of at least US$1 billion, sprawling over 1.5 million hectares, and comprising establishments imported by the state across multiple sectors, the Zona Económica Especial’s ill-conceived design doomed it to failure from the start. But this did not hinder its use for elite rent-seeking, supported by the international networks fed by Angola’s oil wealth. I argue that these outcomes reflect the ruling MPLA’s typical ‘bifurcated policy style’, marked by a disjuncture between discourse and policy practice and the competition for the spoils of the state’s heavy expenditures. Its origins are to be found in the strategies deployed by MPLA leaders to enforce organizational cohesion and to pursue military and programmatic goals over the course of its long civil war. I contend that similar analyses could help illuminate the drivers of industrial policy in other party-based authoritarian regimes.

What does the current impasse around the global governance of sovereign debt tell us about the effects of international financial diversification on the agency of peripheral states in the global political economy? To address this question, this paper examines the drivers of African governments’ participation in the G20 Common Framework for Debt Treatments. Almost half of all low-income countries are at acute risk of, or already in, debt distress, the majority of them African. While most African sovereigns have shunned the G20 initiative, four African states have nonetheless signed up to the Common Framework, including non-defaulting Chad and Ethiopia

We argue that the determinants of African participation can be explained by analyzing debt policy as concerned with more than financial considerations and crucially also evincing strategic foreign policy rationales. We demonstrate that motivations for (not) joining the Common Framework were complex and as much political as they were economic: they reflected attempts to consolidate ties with the geopolitical West following excessive exposure to non-traditional lenders but also served the purpose of signaling broader political alignment with the United States, France and key Gulf Arab states amidst shifting regional security dilemmas.

We support this argument through an empirical analysis of decision-making in Angola, Cape Verde, Chad, and Ethiopia, drawing on elite interviews with senior decision-makers and other key informers, conducted through both project-specific and long-term fieldwork. By approaching debt policy through the prism of African states’ strategic calculus to enhance their sovereignty, this paper brings together important qualitative primary data with insights from the rich scholarship on African governments’ decision-making to shed light on underexplored aspects of sovereign debt governance. Conversely, we also foreground the foreign policy dimensions of African economic policy, which have been underemphasized in the Africanist literature.

The study of the international political economy (IPE) of energy has picked up pace in recent years, as climate change and development join energy security and commercial considerations among the objectives of international energy policy. Moreover, there is increasing pressure from civil society for participation in decision-making on foreign policy. This article introduces the Enetrix Platform, a new database for tracking Energy Diplomacy. Enetrix extracts data from diplomatic documents signed by approximately 193 countries and over 20 international organizations worldwide and provides quick, efficient, and personalized access to it on its platform. We provide descriptive statistics from Enetrix’s Brazil Platform and show how it captures the evolution of Brazil’s energy diplomacy, as well as its main partners and energy resources. A case study of Brazil’s prominent biofuel diplomacy then shows how Enetrix can both help verify existing qualitative knowledge and reveal underexplored aspects of energy cooperation. Despite still being under development, we argue that Enetrix has the potential to improve public accountability and participation in international energy cooperation and thus serve as a useful data tool for quantitative research on the IPE of energy.

Despite being a Great Power and the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China’s identity as a developing country has made it reluctant to shoulder formal responsibilities for financing global climate action. Its foreign aid has nonetheless incorporated climate components for over a decade, while the recent emergence of a “green soft power” agenda has led to a pick-up in Chinese financing for climate adaptation and mitigation. Like other “new” donors, however, China does not follow DAC conventions in labelling its foreign aid according to the Rio climate markers, hindering the tracking of its climate finance. To fill this gap, this paper uses Aid Data’s Global Chinese Development Finance dataset to track Chinese overseas climate finance over time and across countries. To address the notorious difficulties in categorizing climate-related projects, I deploy a combination of keyword searches and manual coding methods. Through regression analysis, I then examine the role of recipient needs, strategic motives, and measures of governance in driving climate finance allocations. I find that although it still forms only a small fraction of China’s overseas finance, climate finance is responsive to recipient country needs, in contrast to the political motivations that predominate in China’s broader official finance.