3 - African State Agency in Sino-Ghanaian Infrastructure Projects

Africa has recently experienced a political re-enchantment with (big) infrastructure, also fuelled by China’s growing presence in African infrastructure financing and construction. As infrastructure has been a major driver of Chinese development cooperation in Africa in recent decades, a growing body of literature has increasingly questioned the role of African state actors in shaping the terms and conditions of Sino-African projects. The ethnographic research I conducted between October 2021 and December 2022 on a Chinese-financed and -built construction project in Ghana has revealed how, in this context, African state actors are often able to exercise their own agency and benefit from this partnership, as well as how the “Chineseness” of the projects is often less crucial than the socio-political dynamics of the host country. By focusing on Ghanaian state actors and institutions, the paper explores the different “spheres” (Chiyemura et al., 2023) of African state agency in Sino-Ghanaian construction projects. In particular, by examining the negotiation process and management strategies of Chinese-financed and -built infrastructure projects in Ghana, the paper unpacks the role played by the political, bureaucratic and technical apparatus of the Ghanaian state. At the same time, since the “state” is composed of many – and often divergent – entities, institutions and subjectivities, the paper also describes how the different state agencies at play in the project studied did not result in the exercise of a “collective agency” of the government (Soulé-Kohndou, 2019: 190), which also hindered the possibility of successful project outcomes.