Old Wine in New Bottles? How Competitive Connectivity Revitalises an Obsolete Development Agenda in Asia

ABSTRACT

In Asia “connectivity” is celebrated as a panacea to kick-start rapid economic growth in the region’s less developed countries. In the process, China and Japan, but also India, Thailand and South Korea, have become major donors and investors in physical infrastructure. While infrastructure is an important facilitator of economic growth, it must be sustainable. This commentary argues that this is not the case in the current infrastructure drive. Many large-scale projects have unacceptably high social costs. This is due to the fact that in the implementation of connectivity schemes, Asian donors are guided by their experiences during their own phase of rapid development. These experiences are strongly influenced by the developmental state and authoritarian variants of modernisation theory. These are outdated concepts with the inherent danger of initiating a downward spiral in project quality, notwithstanding reassurances of the donors to be committed to quality infrastructure.

KEY WORDS:

• Southeast Asia
• development
• connectivity
• infrastructure
• social impacts

Acknowledgments

This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the PHISO Workshop in Davao, Philippines, in March 2018 and a workshop sponsored by the global university consortium AC 21 in Freiburg in July 2019. I am grateful to helpful comments from Hanns W. Maull the workshop audiences, the journal’s anonymous reviewers, the guidance by the editor, Kevin Hewison and the proof reading by Alec Crutchley.