Environing Infrastructure: Communities, Ecologies, and China’s “Green” Development in Contemporary Southeast Asia is a five-year research project (2020-2025) funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. It is carried out by a team of researchers based at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich.

Environing Infrastructure aims to set out a conceptual path linking empirical studies of infrastructure with research into socio-environmental phenomena and discourse. In order to do so, we take the vantage point of contemporary Chinese global investments to introduce novel ways of understanding planetary environmental narratives, transnational political-economic systems and centre-periphery relations, revealing a wider picture that supersedes individual construction projects and particular nation-states.

Methodologically, the project relies on ethnographic methods to reveal the often-staggering disjunctions between economic and policy-driven infrastructural imaginaries, and the grounded realities for those people subject to (and often passed by) such infrastructural interventions. Additionally, in order to produce a more holistic understanding of the various discourses embedded in and produced by global Chinese investments, this project takes a critical approach to the textual and representative constituents of infrastructure.

To this end, an anthropological approach to infrastructure development is integrated with perspectives informed by the environmental humanities.

Ethnographically, we focus on specific case-studies across Southeast Asia. The region has robust economic links with Beijing and is a fundamental part of China’s peripheral diplomacy. Furthermore, for Chinese companies Southeast Asia presents key environmental challenges and in a number of countries Chinese investments have already been met with local resistance.

Working across different fieldsites, Environing Infrastructure thus aims to provide new comparative, collaborative, and ethnographically-grounded reflections on the environmental components of Chinese investments in Southeast Asia. It further investigates how notions of sustainability, “green” development, and nature, are translated, understood, and resisted in particular encounters between Chinese investors, planners, and workers, as well as farmers, NGOs, diasporic communities, and various stakeholders in particular localities.