Chinese Development Finance and African Policy Space: Towards Productive Incoherence?

ABSTRACT How does Chinese Development Finance influence perceptions of policy space across Sub‐Saharan Africa? This paper employs Grabel's concept of ‘productive incoherence’ to both describe the ‘new development finance landscape’ and to explore its implications for recipient‐country policy space. Drawing on an exploratory survey of elite perceptions and three country case studies (Ethiopia, Malawi and Mozambique), we find that Chinese Development Finance contributes to incremental and context‐specific enhancements in policy space, rather than transformative or wholesale change. Moreover, we contend that the extent of policy space is determined more‐so by the internal dynamics, historical legacies and structural position of recipient countries within the global political economy, and the interplay between these elements, than by changes in the external financing environment.