5 The Belt and Road Initiative is a Chinese-lead initiative aiming to foster global connectivity through a sea and a land route.English version (一带一路 -yi dai yi lu), has joined the financing from countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and from international organisations, such as the World Bank. 6 Chinese financing is certainty assuming a central role in infrastructure development across the continent, but Chinese contractors are also expanding their activities to projects not funded by Chinese actors, increasing their market share in the construction industry from 9.9% in 2002 to above 40% in 2011. 7 This is the case for Lamu port in Northern Kenya, focus of this paper, currently funded by the Kenyan government and built by a Chinese construction company.The Lamu port project is part of the broader connectivity initiative, the Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor 8 , a connectivity initiative aimed to connect Kenya to South Sudan and Ethiopia through the development of cross-border connectivity infrastructure, and key component of the developmental agenda Kenya Vision 2030.The institutional structure deployed to coordinate and guide the development of LAPSSET Corridor is highly centralised, as it is often the case with developmental agendas' flagship projects.The Office of the President officially introduced the LAPSSET corridor and created a state authority -LAPSSET Corridor Development Authority (LCDA) -to oversee and guide the implementation of all corridor components. 9 The politics of émergence opens new avenues for the redeployment of state as the driver of development initiatives, but, at the same time, it also unveils evolving power-relations amongst the actors involved. The Chinese-constructed Lamu port is far more than (yet) another Chinese-constructed infrastructure project in Africa; its role as catalyst for the LAPSSET corridor project and its location make it a viable point of connectivity that has increasingly attracted the attention of the international community, including Chinese actors.China-Africa research has so far focused mainly on the drivers for Chinese engagement with African nations 10 and on the effects of said engagement 11 , failing to account for the role of African actors in shaping interactions with their Chinese counterpart and for the fragmented nature of

Infrastructure development has experienced a political renaissance in Africa and is again at the centre of national, regional, and continental development agendas. At the same time, China has been identified by African policy-makers as a particularly suitable strategic partner. As infrastructure has become a main pillar of Sino-African cooperation, there has been growing analytical interest on the role of African actors in shaping the terms and conditions and, by extension, the implementation of infrastructure projects with Chinese participation. This follows a more general African “agency turn” in China–Africa studies, which has shifted the research focus on the myriad ways in which African state and non-state actors shape the continent’s engagements with China. This article is situated within this growing body of literature and explores different forms of an African state agency in the context of Tanzania’s planned Bagamoyo port, Ethiopia’s Adama wind farms, and Kenya’s Lamu port. We posit a non-reductionist and social-relational ontology of the (African) state which sees the state as a multifaceted and multi-scalar institutional ensemble. We show that the extent and forms of state agencies exerted are inherently interrelated with and, thus, highly contingent upon concrete institutional, economic, political, and bureaucratic contexts in which African state actors are firmly embedded. In doing so, we make the case for a context-sensitive analysis of various spheres of a state agency in particular conjunctures of Sino-African engagement.

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participating as a research affiliate. Under the architecture of the project, Cissokho was mandated to research the role of international institutions, while the doctoral project of Gambino was focused on the Chinese involvement in corridor development. All the other researchers were mandated to deal with one or more sub-region and a specific corridor within it. When it came to compiling a book for the project, we wished to bring out the richness from each of these sets of case studies. But we were also conscious of the fact that we needed to offer a more rounded view and to address some case studies that were not part of the original project design. We are fortunate, therefore, to have been able to enrich the volume by including contributions from