Agency, extractivism, and development: the case of the Lobito Corridor

Abstract

In late 2023, the governments of Angola, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo signed agreements with the United States, the European Union and others to upgrade and extend the Lobito Corridor in southern Africa. Part of the G7’s Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, the project has been presented as transformative in media coverage and in official pronouncements. Nonetheless, critics have highlighted how the corridor builds on earlier colonial-era infrastructure and appears primarily designed to shuttle raw materials away from the region. Drawing on diverse perspectives from critical political economy, this paper analyses the Lobito Corridor with particular focus on the agency, or capacity to shape engagements, of the African actors involved. It contends that rather than being an externally driven construct, the Lobito Corridor has been greatly shaped by African actors across regional and national levels in ways that advance their priorities. However, the corridor is also indicative of how regional developmental imaginaries are premised on the large-scale export of raw materials, which (re)produces resource dependency. Likewise, as has been widely documented, such strategies carry considerable environmental, social, and political consequences that ultimately undercut developmental goals.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.