How US-China tensions could hamper development efforts

How US-China tensions could hamper development efforts

Development is becoming part of an ideological competition between the two top powers in the world.

China and the US are each seeking to defend or widen their zones of influence.

Multilateral institutions will need to work to prevent the development agenda from being a victim of geopolitical tensions.



Through much of the Cold War, international development was simultaneously an important policy objective in its own right, and an arena of superpower competition. That era's titanic struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States, was among other things, a competition over models - between market-oriented democracy on the one hand, and communist economics and single party rule on the other.



Neither power limited their patronage to states whose governance aligned with their own, but both sought,