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How to understand a development corridor? The case of Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia‐Transport corridor in Kenya
Author(s) -
Lesutis Gediminas
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
area
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.958
H-Index - 82
eISSN - 1475-4762
pISSN - 0004-0894
DOI - 10.1111/area.12601
Subject(s) - scholarship , mainstream , politics , port (circuit theory) , state (computer science) , political science , sociology , economic geography , regional science , economic growth , geography , economics , electrical engineering , engineering , algorithm , computer science , law
In order to advance the emerging research on development corridors, this paper, drawing on the geographical as well as broader critical social science literatures on infrastructure, offers three different pathways how research on large‐scale infrastructural projects could be conceptually developed. Using the example of Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia‐Transport corridor in Kenya, the paper discusses how imaginaries and material practices of development corridors could be understood as (1) practices of establishing frontiers of extractive capital accumulation that (2) create fragmented forms of state territoriality characterised by complex interaction between the state and private actors and (3) through ideals of “modernity” valorise some lives over others. Although not exhaustive, taken together these approaches demonstrate that development corridors are not just material practices of infrastructural development that translate into sustainable economic growth and development, as advocated by “win‐win” mainstream development discourses. Instead, the approaches outlined in the paper demonstrate that development corridors are value‐laden practices that play a specific function in creating and sustaining socio‐political orders increasingly dominated by global capitalist expansion, as well as different forms of extraction, state–private actor assemblages, and normative ordering of life that the constitution of these orders sets in motion. Through these analyses, the paper contributes to the geographical scholarship on mega‐infrastructures by indicating how the globally structured politics of infrastructure – such as development corridors – advance capitalist expansion by materialising not just in urban or peri‐urban contexts, as is common to focus within the literature, but also play an important role in producing geographies of states, characterised by extractivism, contested territorialities, and normative ordering of life.