Infrastructural developmentalism and its many types of global law: a comparative look at the UN Sustainable Development Goals and China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Abstract

We are currently witnessing the evolution of two gigantic development programmes: the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Perceived and real differences notwithstanding, both place infrastructures at the heart of global development. The present article analyses the relations between this new developmental thinking and law. The fluid rearrangement of public and private, formal and informal legal frameworks spurred by BRI indicate the emergence of a transnational legal infrastructure both tied to and facilitated by a material pragmatism at odds with China’s rhetorical embracement of international law as we know it. The implementation infrastructure of SDGs, for its part, reveals a resilience-driven style of governance difficult to reconcile with the futurity attaching to the idea of law. While these findings would suggest a retreat from international law, the present article argues that many types of global law are emerging and resurfacing from infrastructural developmentalism.