The Belt and Road Initiative and Sustainability: a Driving Force for Change or a Missed Opportunity?

The growing number of developing and emerging economies today challenge the conditionality of Western-based international organisations in which they have little power. China, in particular, has been building on its economic leverage to offer an alternative development model to the world - the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). On 27 November 2023, The Economist published an article with an existential headline, 'Will China save the planet or destroy it?' drawing our eyes to the role of China and the BRI in global warming. Given the BRI's scale and potential impact on the global environment, this role is hard to ignore. Beijing has recently transformed the BRI by introducing a series of policy documents that address sustainability and climate as one of the BRI's major focuses. The fundamental questions are: (1) to what extent does the BRI as an alternative development model help solve global sustainability risks, and particularly climate crisis? and (2) what limitations might erode the BRI's positive effect on global sustainability and, particularly, climate change? Based on the case study of the BRI projects in Central Asia, this article argues that, despite the initiative's capacity to drive sustainability globally, it has not brought real change. The reliance on the 'host country standard' produces policy inconsistencies, regulatory loopholes, and a lack of accountability from Chinese investors. From the global sustainability perspective, this means that China has not yet transformed the BRI to become a sustainability game-changer to drive the climate agenda globally.