The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is China’s wide-reaching global development infrastructure strategy, connecting China internationally through trade and infrastructure projects. While BRI projects can provide critical investment in infrastructure, they may pose significant risks, such as opaque financial deals, project delays, cost inflation, and the absence of local stakeholder consultations. In order to ensure that BRI projects and other foreign investments are sustainable and beneficial to all parties, recipient countries must take concrete steps to close transparency and governance gaps that may enable these risks. However, research regarding the causes of opacity and the steps recipient countries can take to mitigate it is often lacking.
The BRI Monitor, a project by five think tanks in Southeast Asia and the Pacific – IDEAS of Malaysia, Stratbase ADRi of the Philippines, Sandhi Governance Institute of Myanmar, Future Forum of Cambodia, and the Institute of National Affairs in Papua New Guinea – seeks to address this research gap and highlight the need to increase the transparency of infrastructure projects.
The goal is to create greater public demand for transparency and to encourage official agencies to proactively disclose more information about the projects. The project works towards this goal by assessing the transparency of BRI projects from 5 countries across 38 indicators (such as project name, cost, and status) that public officials should proactively disclose according to international best practices.
Ultimately, the website intends to be a platform for the publication of research outputs, a knowledge repository, and a tool for advocating for better governance of major infrastructure projects in the region.
Published Date: March 29, 2022