Emerging Donors' Engagements in Africa: China, India, and the Localizing Peacebuilding and Development Interventions

Traditional donors over the past few decades have sought to craft interventions that put local actors at the forefront of their development and peacebuilding assistance. Most recently, these policies have been framed as “localization of aid.” This latest effort came as concerns about sustainability and inclusivity of development and peacebuilding gained traction and the ineffectiveness of top‐down approaches became apparent to both academic and practitioner communities (Barakat and Milton 2020; Gibbons and Otieku‐Boadu 2021). As other articles in this special issue discuss, these efforts have encountered numerous challenges. However, the donor landscape today is much more complex than it was 30 years ago when the donor community began shifting its approaches to development assistance and more clearly linked this assistance to issues of peace and security (Mthembu 2018; Purushothaman 2021). Today, emerging donors are playing much more important roles in the provision of development, humanitarian, and peacebuilding aid. Are concerns about localization of this aid also important to emerging donors? How do they conceptualize localization of aid, if at all? In this article I examine these questions by focusing on two of the largest emerging donors, India and China, and investigating their development and peacebuilding engagements in Africa, where competition between traditional and emerging donors has intensified in recent years.

China's and India's development and peacebuilding assistance is framed in terms of South–South solidarity, mutual benefit, noninterference, nonconditionality, and nonhierarchical relationships. But these rhetorical framings, like those of traditional donors, mask more complex rationales for and modalities of engagements. Like that of traditional donors, emerging donors' assistance also is driven by a variety of motivations, national interests, and geostrategic goals (Regilme and Hodzi 2021).

The importance of nationally led and nationally owned development and peacebuilding priorities are central to these emerging donors' aid provision. However, in contrast to traditional donors, the local in this framework has meant the state and not civil society. In other words, the local is defined by these emerging donors as represented by sovereign states rather than non‐state actors. I discuss the reasons for this difference in emphasis in the section that follows. In the latter part of the article, I also explore how engagements with the local by China and India in the context of Africa have shifted over time as their footprints across the continent have expanded and their global aspirations have shifted. In that sense, emerging donors' assistance provision policies, like those of traditional donors, are not static but rather evolve to reflect changing realities on the ground as well as changing donor priorities and interests.

This article is organized as follows. First, I discuss emerging donors and the localization debate. Next, I explore the relationship between the principles developed by the Non‐Aligned Movement in the 1950s and the conceptualization of development and peacebuilding assistance by emerging donors in general and China and India in particular. In the third section, I examine the expanding footprint of both countries in Africa and the perceptions in Africa of China's and India's growing involvement on the continent. Finally, I explore the points of convergence (and continued divergence) between China and India and traditional donors with a particular focus on localization efforts and offer some concluding observations.

As Paffenholtz, Poppelreuter, and Ross point out in their contribution to this special issue, donor concerns with localization of aid are not a new phenomenon. Rather, they have been central to both academic and practitioner debates for the past three decades, evident in critiques of the liberal peacebuilding model, particularly in debates concerning the local turn in and decolonialization of peacebuilding (see, e.g., Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013; Paffenholz 2015; Autesserre 2021; Randazzo 2021; Schirch 2022). This literature notes that the top‐down peacebuilding interventions that bypassed local actors—driven by interests, priorities, and policies of international donors—were ineffective, if not counterproductive, and reinforced global hierarchies of power. Both the academic and practitioner communities came to share the view that sustainable development and peacebuilding is possible only if they are locally led and locally owned and that top‐down efforts are unlikely to be successful (Mansuri and Rao 2013; United Nations Peacebuilding Office 2017; USAID 2022). Consequently, the importance of localization of aid gained traction among bilateral and multilateral donors. The centrality of the importance of local actors is noted widely, including in the following agreements and publications:

• the New Deal for Engagement with Fragile States adopted during the Busan conference in 2011;

• Pathways to Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict, the 2018 joint publication by the United Nations and the World Bank;

• the World Bank Group Strategy for Fragility, Conflict, and Violence 2020–2025; and most recently,

• the US Global Fragility Act;

• USAID's Local Capacity Strengthening Policy; and

• the United Nations New Agenda for Peace.

Concerns about lackluster performance of development assistance have been one of the key reasons behind the renewed efforts by traditional donors to localize aid (Dizolele, Kutzer, and Abdullah 2022). These efforts also have been fueled by traditional donors' recognition that the development, humanitarian, and peacebuilding assistance landscape has been fundamentally shifting. By the second decade of the twenty‐first century, alongside traditional donors, emerging donors accounted for a growing percentage of international humanitarian and development assistance (Tank 2012; Mawdsley, Savage, and Kim 2014; Call and de Coning 2017). These emerging donors were increasingly supporting peacebuilding efforts in countries affected by violent conflict (Amar 2012; de Carvalho and de Coning 2013; de Coning and Pradesh 2016; Call and de Coning 2017; Ghimire 2020; Paczyńska 2020). This trend has been particularly visible in Africa, where emerging donors, and in particular China and India, have expanded their footprint. As Samantha Powers, the USAID administrator pointed out during her Congressional testimony, localization of aid would reinforce US policies to counter this growing Chinese influence (Saldinger 2021).

How do emerging donors position themselves vis‐à‐vis the localization debate? Are they looking to localize their development and peacebuilding assistance? If so, do all emerging donors conceptualize localization in the same way and do these conceptualizations differ from the way traditional donors frame these efforts? On the one hand, the answers to these questions may seem straightforward—neither China nor India has joined the localization debate explicitly, at least not in the frameworks adopted by traditional donors. As noted, the term “localization” does not appear in the key documents produced by the government agencies that oversee these countries' development and peacebuilding interventions and neither China nor India has signed onto the various international agreements that place localization at the forefront of traditional donor agendas. On the other hand, the answer is much more nuanced given the very different way in which both states frame their assistance to and relationship with other states of the Global South. In their framing, localization is reflected in the emphasis on nationally led and nationally owned development and peacebuilding priority setting. Thus, the local is understood as promoting state capacity rather than working with and implementing projects with civil society and the nongovernmental sector in the lead.

Although both India and China have participated in international donor conversations about development assistance, such as the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, and conversations within the United Nations on the shaping of sustainable development goals, they conceptualize the local and local ownership differently than do traditional donors. In particular, traditional donors' emphasis on supporting and working through civil society organizations (CSOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) contrasts with China's and India's conceptualization of development and peacebuilding assistance. China's and India's engagements have been framed in terms of nationally led development, whereas their Southern partners put forward their priorities and the interventions are jointly crafted. In many ways, development and peacebuilding assistance often overlap since both India and China see a close relationship between economic development, stability, and security although—as will be discussed below—there are differences in how the two emerging donors frame this connection (Paczyńska 2020). India and China establish relationships with African states and, as noted, historically the two countries have not funneled development funds to non‐state entities such as CSOs and NGOs. Unlike traditional donors whose aid comes with conditionalities, the norms of state sovereignty, nonintervention, and noninterference in domestic affairs to which both India and China subscribe—even if these norms sometimes come under strain when confronted with national security interests—means that they do not set conditionalities on aid that they provide (Mawdsley 2012; Duarte and Milani 2021). This approach does not mean, of course, that India and China do not have their own economic, political, and strategic objectives in engaging with African states. Among other priorities, China and India are interested in Africa's growing consumer markets, natural resources, and support for diplomatic priorities in various international forums. However, neither emerging donor places conditionalities on how internal policies, institutions, and laws should be crafted (Rowlands 2008; Mawdsley 2012; Call and de Coning 2017). Additionally, as the final section of this article discusses, as is the case with traditional donors, China's and India's norms and policies are not static but shift overtime.

For their part, African political elites and non‐elites see the greater diversity of donors that now populate the international scene as an opportunity for African states to exercise greater agency when deciding which donors to establish relationships with and for what purposes. For many, an additional appeal of these two emerging donors is the sense that unlike as is true with many traditional donors, Africans do not experience the same types of power hierarchies and conditionalities (Chihombori‐Quao 2022; M'membe and Opoku 2022). Of course, this does not mean that there are no tensions between African states and populations on the one hand, and India and China on the other. As this article shows, not all development engagements have gone smoothly and not all Africans see these two actors in a positive light.

While this article focuses on two emerging donors—China and India—and their expanding engagements with Africa, the category of emerging donors encompasses countries as diverse as Brazil and South Africa, Russia and Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia. Despite their differences, emerging donors share certain approaches to development and peacebuilding assistance and have set up various joint institutions to facilitate their coordination as well as to provide an alternative to the World Bank for development financing. These joint institutions include the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) Forum, the IBSA (India, Brazil, and South Africa) Forum, and the New Development Bank.

In August 2023, at the 15th BRICS Forum meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, attended by representatives of 50 countries, the Forum—seeking to bolster its global position—extended invitations to join the bloc to Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. However, there were divisions among BRICS members regarding such expansion of membership, with Brazil and India in particular voicing concerns about the potential negative impact of new members on their nonaligned foreign policies, and Russia and China supporting the expansion (Cheatham and Gallagher 2023). In the end, Russia and China's preferences won out. The stated aim of the expansion was to bolster the Forum's position as a counterbalance to Western powers and push forward with policies aimed at providing countries of the Global South with “alternative currencies for trade, investment, and reserves” (Ismail 2023), although Chinese President Xi framed the gathering as one aimed not at creating new confrontations but as “an endeavor to expand the architecture of peace and development” (Zijun and Zihe 2023). In a final joint statement, BRICS also reiterated their commitment to the principle of “African solutions to African problems” and their continued support to “African peace efforts on the continent by strengthening the relevant capacities of African States” (BRICS 2023).

Emerging donors emphasize the importance of respecting state sovereignty as well as solidarity, cooperation, mutual support, and nonhierarchical relationships with states to whom they channel assistance and investments, principles reiterated at the 2023 BRICS summit (BRICS 2023). They also frame their relationships with other states in the Global South in terms of nonintervention and nonconditionality of assistance (Mawdsley 2012; Duarte and Milani 2021). As the IBSA Declaration on South–South Cooperation (SSC) of 2018 emphasized, “SSC (is) as a common endeavour of peoples and countries of the South […] guided by principles of respect for national sovereignty; national ownership and independence; equality; nonconditionality; noninterference in domestic affairs; and mutual benefit” (Chaturvedi 2022: 3).

These norms and commitments can be traced back to the 1955 Bandung Conference, at which the Non‐Aligned Movement was formed by states that did not wish to align themselves with either the United States or the Soviet Union as the Cold War intensified (Acharya 2016). Many were newly independent states emerging out of crumbling colonial empires. Emerging donors' experiences with either direct or indirect colonial domination and the particular ways in which these states were incorporated into the global political economy have shaped how they conceptualize relationships and engagements with countries of the Global South (Six 2009; Chen and Yin 2020; Dunford 2020; Paczyńska 2020). Likewise, the importance of norms of state sovereignty and nonintervention stem from the fact that many emerging donors have had experiences with internal violent conflict and are therefore weary of potential interventions by the international community. This concern has arisen in discussions at the United Nations around the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle, during which emerging donors expressed concerns about coercive interventions; it is also visible in the peacebuilding intervention norms promoted by emerging donors (Paczyńska 2020; Jütersonke et al. 2021; Polle 2023). As I discuss elsewhere (Paczyńska 2020, 2021), these norms often have been strained, especially when it came to emerging donors' engagements in their geographic neighborhoods. China's and India's expanding footprints in Africa and their aspirations to play more prominent global roles have put further strains on these normative commitments. Nonetheless they remain central to how these donors frame their relationships with African states.

India's and China's own struggles with Western imperialism and colonial domination, and the support they offered to independence movements in Africa during the decolonialization period, have positioned them very differently vis‐à‐vis African states during the past couple of decades than traditional donors (King and Venkatachalam 2021; Yuan, Su, and Ouyang 2022). In particular, India and China frame their engagements—and are often perceived accordingly—as free of the baggage of former colonial powers and as offering a different type of partnership than traditional donors, one that is appreciated by many Africans, both at the elite and non‐elite levels (Benabdallah 2022). India's and China's own experiences with violent internal conflict and poverty have made them protective of state sovereignty and have impacted how both states conceptualize the relationship between development and peace (Sherman et al. 2011; Campbell et al. 2012; Mariani 2022). Neither China nor India have subscribed to the policies promoted by traditional donors regarding economic and social development, particularly those regarding the role the state should play in governing the economy of aid recipients. Both nations draw on their own development experiences lifting millions out of poverty while supporting nationally owned and defined development goals and strengthening state capacity (Singh 2022; Yuan et al. 2022). Despite these similarities, however, the Chinese and Indian approaches to both development assistance and peacebuilding are distinct, differing in important respects.

China sees economic development as an essential component of both stability and security. It views poverty as the root cause of conflict and therefore promotes development policies not only to reduce poverty rates but also as a means of ensuring stability and long‐term social peace (Deyassa 2019; Alden and Zheng 2020). China's approach to peacebuilding is often referred to as “developmental peace.” In contrast to traditional donor approaches that provide development assistance with attached conditionalities that seek to promote good governance, the rule of law, human rights, and environmental reforms and standards, China's assistance does not seek to promote change in how recipient governments organize their internal political priorities, respecting their right to choose independently their own paths and models of governance and development (Wong 2021). The basic principles China upholds in providing foreign assistance are mutual respect, equality, keeping promises, mutual benefits, and win–win (State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China 2014). This approach means that China does not remain neutral regarding fundamental state–society relationships. Rather, its policies seek to empower states at the expense of non‐state actors.

Between 2003 and 2015, Chinese foreign aid grew from $631 million to $3 billion, and after a dip in 2016, it again increased, reaching $3.18 billion in 2021 (Muggah 2023). Despite this expansion of foreign assistance, it was only in 2018 that China established the China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA) to coordinate the country's foreign aid. Assuming responsibilities that various ministries had fulfilled in the past, the CIDCA increasingly is signing foreign aid agreements on behalf of the Chinese government, overseeing China's South–South Cooperation Assistance Fund—established in 2015 during the UN Sustainable Development Summit—and signing cooperation agreements between China and various multilateral organizations such as the World Health Organization and the World Food Programme (Tjønneland 2020). Additionally, in 2013 China launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a massive infrastructure development and investment project. By 2020 the BRI stretched from East Asia to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, with over 60 countries, accounting for two thirds of the global population, signing onto the BRI or indicating plans to do so. By some estimates, the total investment in the initiative may be close to $1.3 trillion by 2027 (Chatzky and McBride 2020; Malik et al. 2021). However, the BRI has slowed considerably in the past couple of years due to implementation setbacks and mounting debts of recipient states.

In contrast with China, India does not have a clear philosophy that links security, peace, and development but sees effective governance institutions as essential to stability and peace. Although a democracy—unlike traditional donors—it does not see one form of governance system as better than another as long as the chosen system is inclusive and locally rooted (Aneja 2020; Choedon 2021). India frames its assistance in terms of shared experiences with other countries of the Global South, stating, “the Government of India's approach to Development Partnership has been shaped by India's struggle for independence and solidarity with other colonized and developing countries …. For India, the most fundamental principle in cooperation is respecting development partners and be[ing] guided by their development priorities. India's development cooperation does not come with any conditions” (Ministry of External Affairs 2022).

Although much smaller than China's, India's development assistance also has increased significantly in the past couple of decades, rising four‐fold and reaching $1.6 billion in 2017 (Aneja 2020). Unlike China, which has placed emphasis on infrastructure development and economic development support, India has focused on strengthening governance capabilities of recipient states. For India, the primary components of development partnerships are concessional finance, lines of credit, grants, capacity building, and technology transfer programs under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation Program (ITEC) as well as humanitarian and disaster aid (Sinha 2015; Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India 2021; OECD 2023). In 2012 India created the Development Partnership Administration (DPA) within the Ministry of External Affairs to coordinate India's fast expanding bilateral development cooperation.

Like many other emerging donors, India and China have remained outside of the Organization for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD), skeptical of some of the key traditional donor initiatives, including the localization agenda. Although both countries participated in the OECD‐coordinated High Level Forums on Aid Effectiveness, neither was particularly visible as delegates hashed out the terms of the Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation in Busan 2011 (Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness 2011; Mawdsley, Savage, and Kim 2014; Hearn 2016). Initially, both signed onto the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC) negotiated in Busan, which aimed to provide a forum that was more inclusive of emerging donors (GPEDC 2019). But neither India nor China have had meaningful participation in the GPEDC and neither endorsed the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States (Li et al. 2018). Likewise, although they attended the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016, neither signed onto the Grand Bargain hammered out at the summit that placed the localization agenda at the center of humanitarian interventions (Global Humanitarian Summit 2016). Nor did they endorse the “Donor Statement on Supporting Locally Led Development” signed at the 2022 Effective Development Cooperation Summit (Interagency Standing Committee 2020). This reluctance has been the consequence of both countries' concerns about the implications of these initiatives for noninterference and state sovereignty and their view of these initiatives as driven primarily by the interests of traditional donors (Locke and Wyeth 2012; Hearn 2016; Li et al. 2018). In other words, neither India nor China has backed the aid localization agenda as framed by traditional donors, but concerns about localization of aid are evident in both countries' engagement with recipient countries. However, as noted earlier in the article, China's and India's definitions of the local differ from traditional donor definitions, while how China and India each conceptualize the local diverge in important ways. Moreover, the policies of both India and China, like those of traditional donors, are not static and have shifted over time. In ways that the concluding section will highlight, there are some noticeable convergences between traditional donors and both emerging donors when it comes to the localization of aid agenda.

Between 2003 and 2018, 45 percent of China's expanding foreign assistance went to Africa (China Africa Research Initiative n.d.‐a). Between 2000 and 2020, China signed 1,888 loan commitments worth $160 billion with African governments and African state‐owned enterprises (AIDDATA n.d.; Boston University Global Development Policy Center n.d.; Kitano and Miyabayash 2020). By 2020 China had become a major development partner, having lent $64 billion to African countries. By comparison, the World Bank had lent $62 billion to African governments and African state‐owned enterprises (Paduano 2020; Dreher et al. 2022). At the same time, foreign direct investments (FDI) soared from $75 million in 2003 to $5 billion in 2021, surpassing investments from the United States in 2013 (China Africa Research Initiative n.d.‐b). China's growing development assistance on the continent was driven by state‐to‐state relationships. While recipient demand‐driven, the local was rooted in supporting the state rather than channeled to CSOs and NGOs. In other words, the local in this framework looked quite different than traditional donors' localization efforts.

One of the key challenges to sustainable development in Africa has been its poor infrastructure. Meanwhile, China was in search of access to natural resources that would power its industries and had developed one of the world's largest construction industries, thus providing an opportunity for developing mutually beneficial partnerships with African nations (Ofosu and Sarpong 2022). At the same time, other donors and international lending institutions largely had shifted their financing away from funding large infrastructure projects, such as roads, railways, bridges, ports, and airports, making the availability of Chinese finance all the more attractive to African leaders (OECD 2012; Brautigam and Hwang 2019). Consequently, China ramped up the volume of grants and loans to African states, often collateralized by national assets and repaid in kind, leading to millions of dollars in lending to support infrastructure development (Were 2018). In addition to constructing more than 1,000 bridges, China has built highways, expanded rail networks connecting cities, and introduced light rail in major urban centers such as Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Lagos, Nigeria (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China 2021). In addition to infrastructure, Chinese assistance to Africa focuses on promoting economic development, including through investments in the agricultural sector. More recently, there has been a growing emphasis on soft power in the form of people‐to‐people exchanges, and the number of Confucius Institutes—educational and cultural programs affiliated with the Chinese government and designed to popularize Chinese language and culture (and critics would add propaganda)—has grown across the continent. Despite this shift, China has continued to bypass supporting local CSOs and NGOs, maintaining its focus on bolstering state capacity (ASCIR 2022; Benabdallah 2022).

In addition to bilateral assistance, China has been providing assistance through multilateral channels. During the COVID‐19 pandemic, China distributed medical supplies, medical teams, and vaccines directly to African states and provided funding to COVAX, a WHO‐sponsored facility to expand vaccine access in middle‐ and low‐income countries. China's assistance in Africa, particularly its distribution of vaccines, was a welcome development by the continent's governments as they found themselves largely shut off from access to vaccinations developed by traditional donors (WHO 2021). At the UN, reflecting China's growing aspirations to play a more prominent global role, its representatives linked the fight against the pandemic to long‐term peacebuilding approaches that should be “development‐focused and socially inclusive,” and emphasized the need for solidarity, collaboration, and multilateralism (United Nations 2020).

One of the challenges that loomed large as the pandemic accelerated was the mounting debt of low‐income countries, including those in Africa. China joined other G20 members in April 2020 in launching the Debt Services Suspension Initiative (DSSI), which allowed low‐income countries to apply for a suspension of interest and principal payments on their official bilateral debt provided they were not in arrears with the IMF or the World Bank. In November 2020, cooperation on debt relief expanded when China and the rest of the G20 launched the Common Framework for Debt Treatments Beyond the DSSI. China also made contributions to the IMF's Catastrophe Containment Trust and signed debt relief agreements with 19 African states (Global Debt Relief Dashboard n.d.). This was the first time that China joined a multilateral debt relief initiative, marking a significant shift in Chinese development policies.

As its development assistance and investments in Africa have expanded, China also has expanded its focus on issues of security and multilateral peacebuilding. These shifting interests are reflected in the convening of the 2012 Forum on Africa–China Cooperation (FOCAC). Following the 2012 FOCAC meeting, Beijing expanded its security and multilateral peacebuilding cooperation with African state actors. The Initiative on China–Africa Cooperative Partnership for Peace and Security (ICACPPS) sought to bolster state peace and security capacities and expanded Chinese support to the African Union (AU), the Africa Stability Force, the Africa Capacity for Intermediate Response to Crises, and the Africa Peace and Security Architecture (Alden and Zheng 2020; Engel 2020). At the same time, China expanded its contributions to peacekeeping operations, which since 2013 have included combat troops (Alden and Jiang 2019; de Coning and Osland 2020). As in the case of development assistance, these efforts targeted other governments or multilateral organizations rather than CSO‐ and NGO‐led initiatives. In that sense they were responding to local actors on the continent but did not align with localization of peacebuilding efforts as framed by traditional donors. China defines local actors as sovereign states. The Extraordinary China–Africa Summit of Solidarity in the Face of COVID‐19 underscored the link between the ongoing public health crisis and peace (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China 2021). The 2022 FOCAC Summit reaffirmed the importance of maintaining security, peace, and development on the continent but again focused on supporting states and the AU (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China 2022).

As the engagement of China with Africa has been expanding rapidly, so has India's. India's development assistance, like China's, has been demand‐driven, based on Africa's own prioritization of its needs. Such assistance has supported initiatives that were Africa‐owned and Africa‐led and that aimed at bolstering the continent's self‐reliance (Testoni 2018; Adam 2019; Banerjee 2021). These efforts, like China's, were focused on strengthening state capacity and were not targeted toward African CSOs or NGOs, despite the significant development roles played by CSOs within India. By 2020, the DPA had completed 194 development projects in 37 African countries and was working on completing an additional 77 projects worth $11.6 billion. By the beginning of the 2020s, Africa was the largest recipient of the ITEC program (Singh 2022). Its trade and investment also expanded significantly over the past two decades. By 2020, India accounted for $62.6 billion or 6.4 percent of the total trade of Africa, making it the third largest trading partner after China and the US (Kurzydlowski 2020). India became the fifth largest investor on the continent, with more than $70 billion concentrated in oil and gas, mining, other natural resources, banking, and textiles (IISD 2022). These expanding relationships were reaffirmed at the fourth India–Africa Forum Summit in September 2020, held virtually due to the COVID‐19 pandemic (Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India 2020a).

It was during the COVID‐19 pandemic that India developed a new, more focused policy toward Africa, with Prime Minster Modi's government seeking to make the country Africa's most important partner (Pant 2021). With the new policy, India continued to adhere to noninterference norms but its scope of engagement with African states shifted. While it continued to eschew policies aimed at governance reforms in recipient states, the number of its interlocutors in those states expanded, thus shifting the conceptualization of the local. The pandemic also brought a new interest from African states in attracting Indian investment to strengthen the public health care infrastructure and expand Africa's pharmaceutical and vaccine production capacity (Banerjee 2021). As a consequence, India placed health care delivery—including education, the development of pharmaceutical research, and capacity building—at the center of its inclusive and transparent development model for Africa (Kalingi and Naliaka 2022). One of the factors that has made India an attractive partner for African states has been its emphasis on public–private partnerships that allow for the “fusion of public and private stakeholders with the aim of developing local capacity in an inclusive manner” (Venkatachalam and Banik 2022). India and Africa also began holding India–Africa Entrepreneurship Forums (IAEF) that bring together political and economic leaders, as well as investors and entrepreneurs, to deepen their trading and investment relationships. Development of closer relationships between Indian and African business communities could be seen at the 2022 CII Exim Bank Conclave Business meeting held under the theme of “creating shared futures.” In addition to bilateral ties between India and African states and through the India Africa Economic Trust Fund (INAFEC)—which does capacity building and provides technical assistance in infrastructure, renewable energy, and information and communication technology (ICT)—India also has partnered with the Africa Development Bank Group. As a consequence of these bilateral and multilateral initiatives India has become one of the most important investors on the continent, especially in construction, ICT, railway and auto industries, and energy (African Development Bank Group). In 2023, when India took over the presidency of the G20, it committed to supporting Africa's priorities and interests within this forum (Sinha 2023).

Like China, India has been expanding its collaboration with African states on issues of peace and security, although it does not have a separate category of peacebuilding assistance within its development assistance architecture (Choedon 2021). This new focus on security and conflict resolution was reflected in the discussions at the India–Africa Forum Summits, with the first one held in New Delhi in 2008. In 2011, at the second summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, two documents—the Addis Ababa Declaration and the Africa–India Framework for Enhanced Cooperation—were adopted and set the terms “for the establishment of a long‐term and mutually beneficial partnership encompassing diverse fields” (Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis 2011b). The first India–Africa Strategic Dialogue conference was held in 2011, focusing on issues of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, and reconstruction as processes for facilitating long‐term stability and ensuring civil wars would not reignite (Choedon 2021). While India continued to stress that all UN peacekeeping mandates required the consent of the host states, it nonetheless called for sustained peacekeeping efforts that ensured peacebuilding based on attention to the unique features of each conflict to ensure a successful mission (Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis 2011a; Choedon 2017; Paczyńska 2021). Subsequent strategic and defense dialogues also focused on issues of terrorism, extremism, and maritime security (Mishra 2023). Thanks to this long‐term partnership, thousands of African military personnel have been trained in India (Aneja 2020).

The collaboration deepened further when in February 2020 India and 50 African states signed the Lucknow Declaration, “which appreciated that India and Africa were a significant part of the Indo‐Pacific continuum and that the AU vision for peace and security in Africa coincided with the vision of India of SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region)” (Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India 2020b). The signatories pledged to continue collaborating on peace and security issues, including conflict prevention, resolution, and management; peacebuilding; enhancing the “role of women in peacekeeping”; fighting terrorism; and urging the UN to adopt the Comprehensive Convention on Terrorism (Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India 2020b). Furthermore, the declaration pledged that there would be an improved “exchange of experts and expertise, training programs and capacity building, enhanced support toward peacekeeping and post conflict reconstruction in Africa” and improved joint defense ventures (Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India 2020b). Unlike in the area of trade and investment, peace and security collaborations remained focused on bolstering state and AU capacities, rather than expanding the number of interlocutors.

Although emerging and traditional donors are often framed as competitors for influence in Africa, a number of recent surveys show that African leaders do not perceive them as such in the area of development assistance. For instance, when respondents were asked in the 2022 AidData Perceptions of China Overseas Development Survey to identify which donor (China, France, the Russian Federation, South Africa, the United Kingdom, or the United States) they preferred to work with and in which sector, they indicated that each donor is seen as having different comparative advantages (Custer, Horigoshi, and Marshall 2023). 46 percent of African leaders pointed to China as the preferred partner in areas of energy, transport, and telecommunications infrastructure. However, traditional donors were the preferred partners in areas of governance and the rule of law, with only 1 percent favoring the Chinese while 32 percent chose the United States, 25 percent the United Kingdom, and 16 percent France (Horigoshi et al. 2022). Similar findings emerged out of the 2020 Listening to Leaders Survey, which found that in the social, environmental, and governance sectors, traditional donors were preferred, either through bilateral or multilateral partnerships. Perhaps most importantly, as Custer et al. point out, respondents in this survey said that “the most influential and helpful donors were those that respected the self‐determination of countries to set their own priorities, supported locally identified rather than externally imposed reforms, and ensured that their efforts were in step with those of other actors on the ground” (Custer et al. 2023: 216).

Recent Afrobarometer public opinion surveys reveal similar sentiments among Africans more broadly, with about 60 percent of respondents having positive views of both Chinese and American influence on the continent (Lekorwe et al. 2016; Sanny and Selormey 2021). Other studies have found that most Africans view the Indian presence on the continent positively as well (Harris and Vittorini 2018; Venkatachalam and Banik 2022). Similar sentiments were expressed by African youth, with 76 percent of respondents viewing the influence of China in their countries positively, 68 percent viewing the influence of India positively, and 72 percent viewing the influence of the United States positively (Africa Youth Survey 2022).

Initiatives by both China and India have reshaped the donor landscape in Africa significantly. The initiatives, agreements, collaborations, and new bureaucratic structures indicate that both countries are making significant strategic investments in the development, peace, and security sectors, although, as noted, they frame their engagements and conceptualize the local differently than do traditional donors. While the demand‐driven and nationally prioritized development interventions resemble in some ways the ideas driving the localization agenda, China and India funnel their support through state governments rather than toward CSOs and NGOs. At the same time, as this section has shown, these conceptualizations of the local are beginning to shift slowly, a point that I will revisit toward the end of this article.

Localization is just the latest effort by traditional donors to ensure local ownership of development and peacebuilding efforts. Over the past decade there have been numerous initiatives to strengthen local leadership and ownership of both types of interventions as a way of ensuring that they are more effective, legitimate, and sustainable (Ingram 2022). As the preceding section of this article discussed, emerging donors have conceptualized the local quite differently than traditional donors. In particular, rather than seeking to shift funding and initiatives to CSOs and NGOs in recipient countries, emerging donors have focused historically on bolstering the capacity of recipient states.

However, as with traditional donors, the agendas, interests, and policies of emerging donors have not remained static. For instance, both China and India, but particularly the former, have become much more willing to mediate conflicts within states experiencing violence, especially when their investments and nationals are at risk. For example, China supported the restoration of relationships between Saudi Arabia and Iran in 2023. This shift toward mediating conflicts has often put a strain on nonintervention norms.

There also have been shifts in how China structures its development aid. In 2021 China published a white paper that set out to reframe its development assistance (State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China 2021). In part, it seems that the white paper was a response to some of the criticism leveled at China that focused on aspects of the BRI, including its transactional and ad hoc nature, China's pressure on states to take on unsustainable levels of debt to the point of being predatory, China's failure to give sufficient control to national authorities, and the limited participation of national labor in the projects (Bradsher 2018; Perlez 2019). Most notably, while the white paper continued to emphasize the need for countries to set their independent development paths and China's respect for state sovereignty and noninterference (State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China 2021), it placed much greater focus on a more activist approach to “multilateral rule setting” (Cordell 2021). The white paper extended the efforts undertaken by China in 2018 and 2019 to shift its development focus and deepen outreach to multilateral institutions, including the International Monetary Fund. The principles enshrined in the white paper linked the BRI efforts to the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and placed more emphasis on supporting development at the local level.

In 2021 China and Africa held a summit in Senegal at which they developed China and Africa in the New Era: A Partnership of Equals, a framework that put forward nine principles. The framework emphasized the importance of win–win cooperation, mutual respect, and common development, stating that “the greatest good in China–Africa relations is to closely combine Africa's independent and sustainable development with China's own development, and reject the zero‐sum game and actions driven by a narrow pursuit of profit” (The People's Republic of China Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2021). The framework declared that going forward the focus would be on expanding economic cooperation between China and the AU, including infrastructure development, support for Africa's industrialization policies, agricultural development, digital and green energy development, and boosting government‐to‐government cooperation through FOCAC. The document, however, once again emphasized the principle of “respecting the will of African countries, not interfering in African countries' internal affairs” (The People's Republic of China Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2021). While the document mentions China's continued support of local governments, academics, enterprises, and youth, and of nongovernmental organizations in reducing poverty, it notes that this support will come through exchanges and programmatic collaboration rather than putting local organizations in the lead.

Like China, India has framed its development assistance as recipient‐led rather than donor‐led, which India has contrasted with the approach of traditional donors. And while both countries' policies have been shifting, India has moved closer to traditional donors in some of the more technical aspects of project development while remaining reluctant to condition aid on “norms” such as human and environmental rights, seeing them as violating noninterference principles (Mawdsley 2019). Moreover, as is the case with China, some of the changes in India's development assistance approach have less to do with responding to external criticism than to various domestic concerns, particularly scandals that erupted shortly before the 2015 India–Africa Forum Summit involving India's main development cooperation tool—lines of credit—the majority of which, it turned out, were funneled through four inexperienced companies. The scandal prompted the adoption of new regulations of the country's development finance sector (Iyer 2015). As traditional donors began pursuing localization policies, in some ways India has moved in the opposite direction. Rather than its previous approach, which put African governments in the driver's seat as to investment decisions, the Indian government has assumed more control over such decisions due to the fallout from corruption scandals surrounding Indian companies' investments in African countries. Among other changes, the new regulations “removed African governments' role in contracting Indian companies, moving this process in‐house to the Indian Exim Bank” (Dye 2022a). These policy changes signaled a shift away from India's previous development cooperation approaches based on noninterference, recipient‐led demands, and the principle of sovereignty first (Dye 2022b). Despite giving India a much greater say in setting the development agenda and moving away from recipient‐led assistance, state‐to‐state relations continue to be central to the project approval process, thus maintaining a very different emphasis than USAID's localization approach.

At the same time, other changes have been bringing India's approach closer to the localization policies of the United States. In particular, India appears to be slowly changing its approach to democracy promotion. Historically, India was reluctant to engage in democracy promotion, seeing it as intervening in other states' internal affairs. Rather, as Aneja points out, it supported national governance institutions that promoted stability without regard to political system (Aneja 2020). As India's competition with China for influence in Africa grew, it sought to differentiate itself from China and has moved slowly and reluctantly in the direction of democracy assistance if not promotion, focusing on technical courses on election management and good governance (Venkatachalam and Banik 2022). It continues to see democracy promotion as sitting uncomfortably alongside its commitments to noninterference, nonintervention, and state sovereignty and often when engaging in democracy assistance it does so in tandem with economic development projects (Hall 2017).

Today's development and peacebuilding donor landscape is much more complex than just a few decades ago. In addition to traditional donors, emerging donors such as China and India have come to play much more prominent roles in development and peacebuilding assistance. These shifts have been especially visible in Africa. Emerging donors frame their engagements on the continent in terms that are different from those employed by traditional donors. The issue of localization of aid, which has animated both academic and policy debates in traditional donor states, has not resonated in similar ways for emerging donors. This is not to say that emerging donors do not place the local firmly on their agenda. They are deeply concerned about poverty reduction, including at the community level, and have expanded their people‐to‐people exchanges. But development funding flows to governments rather than CSOs and other local organizations, notwithstanding more convergence between traditional and emerging donors in recent years. The mutual benefit, nonintervention, and nonconditionalities norms that frame emerging donor engagements many sometimes be challenging to maintain, but the joint agenda setting of development priorities is one that all donors would benefit from adopting more frequently.