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The past decade has seen a gradual convergence between the modernizing, top-down development agendas associated with “new donors” to Africa and the human development agenda more commonly linked to traditional donors. But while instruments such as the Sustainable Development Goals now demand both industrialization and empowerment, donors still struggle to reconcile these competing expectations. This article uses a variety of qualitative data to examine one such project: the attempted transfer of Japanese management techniques (or kaizen) to workplaces across Ethiopia as part of Japanese official development assistance. Asking why and how the Japanese and Ethiopian governments pursue these aims, the article finds an intervention that is low modernist in design: its goals and logics are modernist but tempered by a respect for local knowledge and a preference for evolutionary over revolutionary change. The fact that Japan is the donor to promulgate such a paradigm is no coincidence, I find, given the historical origins of kaizen and Japan’s long-standing hybrid role in international development debates. Low modernist interventions such as Ethiopian kaizen demonstrate the utility of moving beyond dichotomies (China/West, growth/equity, efficiency/empowerment). But in both Ethiopia and the Japanese aid apparatus, powerful centrifugal forces still make low modernism a difficult balancing act to achieve.

This briefing examines the recent creation and downfall of seven Chinese-funded agro-industrial farms in Angola, and sees in the outcome of this initiative the latest demonstration of the difficulties in converting China's and Angola's resource-based relationship into a more economically sustainable and developmental partnership.

This article identifies strands of literature across several disciplines that seek to explore the ideational impact of the proliferating linkages between East Asian and African societies. It argues that these debates could more fruitfully engage with one another if their common concern is understood to be the intersection of modernities—broadly defined as societal self-understandings that wish to provide answers to collective economic, political and epistemic problems. These discussions are well-placed to further explore these intersections by understanding how processes of policy transfer and policy assemblages link various East Asian and African modernities, while reflexive and transnational methodologies such as multi-sited ethnographies may provide innovative methodological tools. A case study of recent attempts to construct Chinese-inspired industrial parks across Ethiopia provides an example of intersecting modernities in practice.

Since the early 2000s, there has been a sharp increase in speculations that China’s development trajectory may provide a model for other developing countries—particularly those in Africa—to follow, and that this poses a profound challenge to the dominant global development paradigm. A highly-charged media and policy debate has increasingly made its way into the academic literature, with central questions focusing around the lessons that African and developing countries are drawing from China and around the desirability of such emulation. Due to the exploratory and recent nature of this growing literature, however, very few studies have been sufficiently grounded in empirical or theoretical analysis. This dissertation seeks to remedy this situation by examining the ideational influence of China’s development on those ultimately charged with evaluating and implementing these purported ‘models’: developing country elites. Drawing on the theories of cross-societal emulation (Westney 1987) and lesson-drawing (Rose 1991), it finds that elites in two countries cases—Ethiopia and Kenya-indeed seek to emulate countries in East Asia. China, however, is viewed as only one source of potential ‘lessons’, and its elites often embed its experiences within a wider East Asian development trajectory. In both country cases, this emulation challenges many of the assumptions that have driven development since the 1970s. Unlike the Washington Consensus, the development paradigm prompted by this lesson-drawing is historically-contingent and views nation-building by a strong, visionary political leadership as the country’s single most important priority. Because it favours large physical infrastructure projects, rapid economic growth, technologically-optimistic solutions and a civilisatory discourse, its divergence from the more recent ‘Augmented’ Washington Consensus is even more striking. In these and in other central lessons drawn, the development approach it most resembles, in fact, is

A decade of researching China–Africa relations has been constructive but also frustrating, because the production of critical analysis has been dominated by researchers based in the ‘West’ despite a desire for co-produced knowledge. Using a series of ethnographic reflections from our research, we examine the possibilities of taking on board, but moving beyond, Connell’s critique of ‘Southern theory’. Connell argues that theory production about the global South tends to be extractive with Western epistemologies framing ‘legitimate’ knowledge. Producing theory that reflects Southern concerns and needs is not about inverting this bias but takes place through production of ‘connected’ knowledges in the sense that Bhambra invokes. She sees social reality in the global South as always constructed from historical and spatial connections and so analysis can proceed by recognizing such connectedness in building theory. This connectedness that involves an increasingly globalized China, and, arguably, greater scope for African agency, ‘ruffles’ some of the spatial categories and power relations implicit in much postcolonial theory. Methodologically it speaks to the need for cultural brokerage that attempts to straddle and connect peoples, places and epistemologies, albeit without ever escaping the established power hierarchies of knowledge production. It also forces us to consider the political economy of research across different national settings, which shape how scholars relate.

A decade of researching China–Africa relations has been constructive but also frustrating, because the production of critical analysis has been dominated by researchers based in the ‘West’ despite a desire for co-produced knowledge. Using a series of ethnographic reflections from our research, we examine the possibilities of taking on board, but moving beyond, Connell’s critique of ‘Southern theory’. Connell argues that theory production about the global South tends to be extractive with Western epistemologies framing ‘legitimate’ knowledge. Producing theory that reflects Southern concerns and needs is not about inverting this bias but takes place through production of ‘connected’ knowledges in the sense that Bhambra invokes. She sees social reality in the global South as always constructed from historical and spatial connections and so analysis can proceed by recognizing such connectedness in building theory. This connectedness that involves an increasingly globalized China, and, arguably, greater scope for African agency, ‘ruffles’ some of the spatial categories and power relations implicit in much postcolonial theory. Methodologically it speaks to the need for cultural brokerage that attempts to straddle and connect peoples, places and epistemologies, albeit without ever escaping the established power hierarchies of knowledge production. It also forces us to consider the political economy of research across different national settings, which shape how scholars relate.