The Club‐based Climate Regime and OECD Negotiations on Restricting Coal‐fired Power Export Finance

Liao, Jessica C.

doi:10.1111/1758-5899.12894

Cited by 10 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…However, several loopholes allowed ECAs of Japan and South Korea to resume their activities in the region, which did not directly violate the agreement but effectively undermined its spirit. Other OECD member states such as Germany, France or the USA, in contrast, had also provided substantial financial support to coal power projects around the world through their ECAs (NRDC, 2016) but largely halted these activities after 2015 (Liao, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Financing sustainable development? The role of foreign aid in Southeast Asia's energy transition

Bertheau

Lindner

2021

Sustainable Development

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The rapid deployment of modern renewable energy generation capacity in the fastgrowing Southeast Asian region will be crucial to ensure that the region can meet its increasing future energy demand in a sustainable way. However, many countries will need assistance through international cooperation and foreign aid to develop their sustainable energy sources. The three East Asian donor states Japan, South Korea and China are particularly crucial because they account for a large share of aid disbursement to the region and serve as development role models for many recipient countries. All three states are signatories of the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and thus committed to the global goals of climate protection and sustainable energy development. This paper is based on an analysis of official aid databases and second-party data to explore the details of the energy-related aid contributions of the three key donor states to Southeast Asia during the last 15 years. The findings indicate that all three states contradicted their own international pledges by financing fossil-fuel power generation projects in many countries in the region. Although recent policy changes in Japan and South Korea are cause for optimism, the opacity of China's energy-related aid flows combined with its renewed support for domestic coal power generation are worrying signs for the future of energy development in Southeast Asia and beyond.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Financing sustainable development? The role of foreign aid in Southeast Asia's energy transition

Bertheau

Lindner

2021

Sustainable Development

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“…However, the Go-Out campaign also relied on a bottom-up approach to help Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) expand their overseas markets. While using Beijing's general policy guidelines to identify and pursue business opportunities in countries deemed diplomatically important, SOEs often took the liberty to contact foreign government officials and firms and initiate projects and lead Chinese policy banks' lending (Gill and Reilly 2007;Liao 2019). As Chinese state-backed lending often came without proper due diligence, SOEs and their local partners, with business interests in mind, had much leeway to push ahead environmentally harmful projects.…”

Section: Progress and Challenges In "Greening" China's Infrastructure...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Japan and South Korea are the other major financiers in this sector, although in 2020 the two countries announced the phase out of financing overseas coal-fired power plants. For more details, see Liao (2020).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The focus on Southeast Asia is not only because the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is commonly viewed as among the most relevant regional interstate organizations in the Global South but also because the region is among the places where China is most active in exercising its economic influence (Wang 2006;Lim, Li, and Ji 2021;Reilly 2021) Moreover, energy projects have accounted for the lion's share of China's overseas infrastructure development, and nowhere is China-built energy infrastructure more prevalent than Southeast Asia. Since the early 2000s, Chinese firms have actively expanded into various energy sectors in the region, driven by both China's own domestic energy demand (Gueldry and Liang 2016) and Southeast Asia's need in energy infrastructure (Andrews-Speed, Qiu, and Len 2016;Liao 2019). Since the launch of BRI, China has continued to woo Southeast Asia through both cross-national development plans and bilateral economic cooperation agreements, including many energy projects with negative environmental impacts.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Talking Green, Building Brown: China-ASEAN Environmental and Energy Cooperation in the BRI Era

Liao¹

2022

Asian Perspective

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This article examines the evolution of China-ASEAN environmental and energy cooperation since the 2010s with a focus on changes following the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It shows that over the past decade China and ASEAN have actively expanded cooperative frameworks and mechanisms in the domain of environmental protection as part of their comprehensive approach to sustainable development, particularly regarding energy projects. Nonetheless, the implementation record in their energy cooperation, that is, the lion's share of BRI projects in Southeast Asia, remains unsustainable and contradicts with their shared "green" policy discourse. The article examines factors from both sides of China and ASEAN that contribute to this disconnect and explains why China's own accomplishments in renewable energy development fail to spill over to Southeast Asia. These findings have implications for China's impact on global governance and its leadership role in the Global South.

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“…China's overseas infrastructure finance falls under the domain of international development (Chin and Quadir, 2013;Mawdsley, 2012) and international trade (Hopewell, 2019;Liao, 2021). The reason that it encompasses two domains, as the sections below elaborate further, is associated with the dual nature of the Chinese credits: they fulfill state objectives while at the same time pursuing commercial interests.…”

Section: A Dichotomy: the Current International Credit Governance And The Role Of Public Financial Agenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infrastructure finance, late development, and China’s reshaping of international credit governance

Chen

2021

European Journal of International Relations

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How is the rise of China affecting international governance? This paper examines the domain of infrastructure finance by focusing on China’s two policy banks, which are the main creditors of China’s overseas infrastructure projects. While the incumbent international credit regimes led by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) distinguish development-oriented aid from commercially oriented export credits, emerging late-developed economies blur this dichotomy by largely funding development projects with state-backed export credits. The way China alters the OECD’s credit governance, this paper argues, demonstrates both the generality of late development and the peculiarity of “Chinese” development. Rather than directly subsidizing firms’ international business with the state’s fiscal revenue, policy banks financialized host country’s state-owned and state-coordinated assets using various market instruments. By doing so, they gave Chinese firms a comparative advantage in the markets of less developed regions, allowing them to undertake projects that firms from advanced industrial countries cannot. This financing mechanism has reshaped the international development regime by transforming the dominant means of credit allocation from state-led aid-giving to market-based exchange, and rewritten the liberal rules of the international export credit regime by financing the developing world in a both statist and liberalist manner. As a result, China has built a paralleled regime in regions insufficiently covered by the existing financial schemes of incumbent credit regimes.

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The Club‐based Climate Regime and OECD Negotiations on Restricting Coal‐fired Power Export Finance

Cited by 10 publications

References 31 publications

Financing sustainable development? The role of foreign aid in Southeast Asia's energy transition

Financing sustainable development? The role of foreign aid in Southeast Asia's energy transition

Talking Green, Building Brown: China-ASEAN Environmental and Energy Cooperation in the BRI Era

Infrastructure finance, late development, and China’s reshaping of international credit governance

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