Imaginaries of growth corridors: visions of high modernity

Colonial corridor imaginaries laid emphasis on extracting and transferring as much of the natural resources from the colony to the European colonizer as possible, often violently, ‘with a consequent destruction of economic and social life’ as exemplified by Jewsiewicki (1983). Take for instance the Congo River corridor, which was established at the Berlin conference in 1884/1885. Due to its richness in rubber, ivory, and minerals (gold, tin, copper, diamonds), access to the Congo basin was a top priority for European powers (Makori 2017, Ahmad and Awan 2017). As the Congo River is only navigable from the ocean as far upstream as Matadi, a railway network was built to connect the copper mines of the hinterlands with marine access. Despite these plans, the long distance, low capacity, and high costs never allowed the railway connection to be used for substantial copper exports. Instead, the Cape railway via South Africa became the preferred route of extraction (Griffiths 1997). Another colonial corridor project, which was never completed, was the Cape to Cairo railway promoted by the British colonialist Cecil Rhodes, who was trying to secure the southern states of the African continent to the British Empire. In order to connect neighbouring territories, the corridor followed a military purpose, bringing supplies and troops for territorial expansion and commercial interests (Darwin 1997, Griffiths 1997). This coloniality of corridors, which has partly endured up until today (Enns and Bersaglio 2019), deserves a closer look. In terms of practical implementation, even contemporary corridors need to be constantly legitimized against notions of (neo-)colonial persistence. In terms of researching corridors, the long duration of infrastructural exploitation demands that research into the corridors emphasizes the (neo-)imperial continuities under which the corridors are mobilized (Aalders 2020, Lesutis 2020).

After independence, African leaders in the 1950s and 1960s saw infrastructure-based development as a spatial technique to boost economic growth. This optimism toward mega-infrastructures was based, on the one hand, on the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union, which occurred in a similar manner (Mold 2012). On the other hand, Western policy advice inspired by Rostow’s (1960) approach of ‘Stages of Economic Growth’ and by Rosenstein-Rodan’s (1943) ‘Big Push’ theory has emphasized the role of infrastructure investments as a driver of modernization and self-sustaining growth. Growth corridors are envisioned to integrate places and people and to connect them to global markets (Dannenberg et al. 2018, Zoomers and Westen 2011). Improved connectivity is seen as crucial for creating economies of scale and trickle-down effects, and to allow rural places to increase and specialize in different economic sectors (e.g. agriculture, tourism). It is therefore assumed that the development of seemingly ‘disconnected’ regions may not only allow them to benefit from the gains of globalization, but also promote endogenous innovations and foster the growth of related firms. Through such spatial concentration processes along corridors, especially employment and economic spillovers are therefore promoted as corridor promises.

In contrast to such teleological aspirations to envision rural Africa’s future through the development of corridors as ‘dreamscapes of modernity’ (Jasanoff and Kim 2015, Müller-Mahn 2020), previous African mega-infrastructure projects of the 1960s and 1970s have failed (Mold 2012). The historical experience in postcolonial Africa shows that the majority of infrastructure investments were neither sustainable nor catalytic for economic development. It seems that the fictional expectations, or ‘imagined futures’ (Beckert 2016), based on Soviet alternatives or neoclassical theory neither materialized nor benefitted larger parts of the population. According to Mold (2012), these failures are explained by high dependence on foreign finance, poor project management and domestic expertise, and rent-seeking behaviour, which resulted in unsustainable growth and incomplete projects.

Considering these failures, growth corridors are nevertheless experiencing a comeback latest since the turn of the millennium. With support from African governments, international donors, and investors, more than 30 growth corridors are currently being developed or planned throughout Africa (Nel and Rogerson 2016). Today, growth corridors go beyond solely infrastructural development and are designed much more broadly under the umbrella of spatial development initiatives (Dannenberg et al. 2018). In Africa, the concept of growth corridors strongly originates from the South African Spatial Development Initiative (SDI) Programme (Ramutsindela 2010). In Nelson Mandela’s vision of an economically integrated Africa, growth corridors were meant to connect rural and urban areas in order to create functioning regional markets across Africa (Tate 2011). Thus, growth corridors became an instrument to envisage a better future, to ‘boost economic growth, diversify economies, expand exports and foreign exchange, increase skills and technology transfer, and create jobs and boost local incomes’ (Kuhlmann et al. 2011: 6). The Southern African Development Community (SADC) took the lead in defining 16 corridors. In 1998, the African Union adopted the concept for the entire continent and further promoted it through the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). This led to the establishment of the WBNLDC by the governments of Namibia and South Africa in 2000/2001 and was later followed by the launch of similar corridors (including SAGCOT) on the East African seaboard (Mulenga 2013).

This recent comeback of corridor-based development is further underpinned by Pan-African aspirations of continental unity between African sub-regions, which also partly drove the post-liberation phase of corridor development. The launch of the African Development Bank’s Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA) and ongoing preparations for PIDA-2 promote investments into corridors as a solution to the ‘Quest to Integrate Africa’ (AFDB 2019). PIDA-2 seeks to establish cross-border infrastructures based on the guide-lining criteria ‘regional integration’, ‘inclusiveness & sustainability’, and ‘economic & financial impact’ (AU 2020). Accordingly, the most recent rebranding of corridors can be interpreted as a culmination of the process of African corridors once more becoming a dominant planning paradigm over the last two decades. Whereas the move from transport corridors towards development corridors has been discussed as a ‘new generation of growth corridors’ (Dannenberg et al. 2018), their latest branding clearly goes beyond a predominantly economic focus by promising a ‘holistic planning’ that also acknowledges inclusiveness and sustainability impacts through funding criteria such as gender sensitivity, migration, youth employment, and climate friendliness (AU 2020). By tying ever more impact dimensions to corridors, corridor visions have therefore increasingly become sensationalized, but at the same time depoliticized in such a way that corridors are put forward as a multidimensional panacea, and without discussing and allowing alternatives, they are just implemented.

Within the promised ‘holistic’ planning, contemporary corridors include the promotion of specific value chains. Through the sectoral targeting along value chains, governments and corridor planers attempt to encourage industry-spanning economic interventions that can motivate different value-chain actors to invest and settle along the corridor and basically use value chains as tools of economic, and also social and environmental upgrading (Cf. Barrientos et al. 2011, Humphrey and Schmitz 2002). To support value-chain-driven upgrading processes, private public partnerships (PPs) constituted by nation-states, multinational firms, and international donors are targeted as key actors in funding and implementing corridors. Especially global finance, both from private and public sources, is seen as a means of overcoming the general lack of investments within corridors and along their value chains, but also as a way to encourage a tighter integration into global markets (Gálvez Nogales and Webber 2017).

Against these optimistic expectations, there is a growing body of literature challenging the taken-for-granted assumption that value-chain integration always generates socioeconomic benefits. Critical studies draw attention to unintended effects or even dark sides of value-chain integration through corridors. Fundamental to the understanding of global value chains, power asymmetries can lead to global inequalities as they intensify the uneven geographical and social distribution of value-added activities. As Breul et al. (2018) have shown, the territoriality of global value chains is significant in order to understand how rents along the value chain are distributed. Put simply, a value chain connects different places with different functions and capacities affecting the creation, transfer, and appropriation of value, and with that also upgrading possibilities of upstream/backward-linked chain places and actors. While some places and actors can filter out high-value activities, they do so at the expense of others, which are left with low-value activities such as resource extraction or labour-intensive production. Upgrading possibilities are then restricted through filtering processes and rarely trickle down to upstream actors and places automatically, but they can just as well drive the uneven accumulation of capital along value chains (Breul et al. 2018).

Expanding these critiques of uneven accumulation processes along value chains even further, some authors propose a more integrated analysis of local value-chain impacts, paying attention not only to vertically and tightly integrated chain actors (Bolwig et al. 2010). External actors, expelled actors, nonparticipants or excluded actors also need to be considered when developmental outcomes are analysed. Power relations, inequality, resource access, and empowerment between chain participants and their communities in which they are located are additional and necessary horizontal elements in order to assess the economic, societal, and environmental impact. In order to overcome the ‘inclusionary bias’ of value chain research (Bair and Werner 2011) it is proposed to add a livelihoods perspective in order to assess the unintended impacts of value-chain integration (Hulke et al. 2020, Vicol et al. 2018). This perspective allows the comparison of outcomes of value-chain integration by acknowledging the role of alternative livelihood strategies (e.g. local and regional value chains) which might otherwise be suppressed by powerful external actors (lead firms, NGOs, national ministries) or regional institutions.

Bringing value chains to the foreground has hence not only emerged as widespread logic of imagining and practicing contemporary corridors; it can also serve as a simple method to understand where and for whom growth corridors materialize. By asking where corridors actually materialize, the geographically uneven impacts of corridors can be distinguished. By asking for whom such materializations take place, it becomes further visible and explainable how corridors have effects on different actors regardless of whether they are integrated into or excluded from corridor imaginaries.