With the US and Europe now seeking to outcompete China in funding infrastructure programmes across the developing world, the benefits of such goodwill can only be undermined by uncoordinated development.

 

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The Lotus Tower in Colombo, Sri Lanka, which was built under the Belt and Road Initiative, is seen in April 2019. A trilateral infrastructure dialogue between China, the EU and the US is needed to better coordinate global infrastructure investments. Photo: Xinhua

On November 25, British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss launched the British International Investment (BII), a revamped development finance institution that will fund infrastructure investments across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.

The agency is just the latest initiative in what is becoming an increasingly intense and acronym-laden field of strategic manoeuvring and competition. In June, G7 leaders backed Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative, designed to meet the infrastructure needs of low- and middle-income countries. In September, Ursula von der Leyen announced the EU’s new connectivity strategy, the “Global Gateway”.

Given our shared planetary challenges, not least the looming climate crisis and economic fallout from the pandemic, the stakes are too high to simply allow infrastructure efforts to descend into an alphabet soup of competing initiatives. If we truly want to “build back better”, then surely it would be helpful to find more ways to “build back together”.

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From SCMP， 2021-12-1