Despite the challenging context of the COVID pandemic and shrinking spaces for research due to growing authoritarianism, the project achieved its core objectives. It demonstrated that Brazilian and Chinese actors frame outbound investment as solidarity-driven, win-win developments, and that African political elites use similar narratives. While these narratives conceal important power asymmetries, elites foster their own interests through them (see e.g. Cezne and Hönke 2022 in World Development). At the same time, we demonstrate the liminal positioning towards the Global South that produces ambiguous results: China portrays itself as both part of, and separate, from the Global South, combining developmentalist, nationalist, and moral cosmopolitan discourses. Brazil has been both nurturing its Global South identity critical of Western hegemony while positioning itself as part of ‘the West’ and a bridge between worlds (see Hönke, Cezne and Yang 2023 in Global Society). While major Brazilian companies frame their policies as culturally sensitive, leveraging Brazil’s linguistic and historical ties with Africa, this masks environmental degradation, labour exploitation, and corporate control in Brazilian-led projects. China has issued demanding social guidelines for its companies abroad, yet Chinese professionals pragmatically muddle through and improvise with significant leeway. Since they remain caught in a state-centric worldview, however, they pragmatically nurture relations and donate in an ad hoc way as they deem necessary, yet struggle with community expectations to provide, or compensate for the negative impacts of their work, and try to manage conflicts in contexts with limited state presence (see for example Yifan Yang 2026 in Africa Spectrum; Bunskoek and Hönke 2026 in Pluriversal International Relations).
In terms of whether and how new practices emerge from this and expand globally, the project shows, first, that neither Brazil nor China exports a ‘model’ to Africa. Rather, around their sites, manifold and conflicting practices prevail. Second, we followed Chinese professionals to trace incremental changes of practices through learning in transnational professional communities of practice. An article in Global Studies Quarterly explains how and why transnational professional communities are much more stratified along lines of race and identity than assumed, with Chinese expats separated from other issue professionals in the same occupation.
Finally, the research group demonstrated that frequency and modes of contestation rarely differ regarding non-Western companies. Some differences stand out though regarding scale and the effectiveness of transnational contestation. Brazilian projects have encountered well-organised transnational alliances (see Cezne 2022) which is less the case for Chinese companies. Limited opportunities to cooperate with Chinese social organisations, or to mobilize a Chinese public back home, limit an important channel for public scrutiny and accountability (see chapters in Africa’s Global Infrastructures 2024; also Sändig, Hönke and Kabemba 2024).
