A Partnership Centered on Norm Adoption

Abstract

This article investigates the institutional collaboration between the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) on the Dushanbe-Uzbekistan Border Road Improvement Project in Tajikistan. It argues that AIIB’s adoption of the EBRD’s environmental and social safeguard norms and project management norms facilitates the provision of infrastructure-related public goods in Tajikistan in three ways. First, the harmonization between the governance norms of these two banks facilitates their cofinancing which fills the financing gap of the project. Second, the policy coherence enables the two institutions to implement environmental and social safeguard norms that the Tajikistan government is unable to fully practice. Third, it paves the way for the transfer of project management experience from the EBRD to AIIB. Through this learning process, AIIB is able to provide additional infrastructure-related public goods in Tajikistan by acting as an independent provider of project monitoring services.