Regional development implications of the Belt and Road Initiative – a case study of Darwin

Abstract

China's launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013 reinvigorated debates on infrastructure-led development and reshaped core–periphery relations through large-scale port investments. A prominent case is the 99-year lease of Darwin Port in Australia's Northern Territory to the Chinese company Landbridge Group in 2015, which sparked both development hopes and geopolitical controversy. While subnational actors play a central role in mediating external investment – especially in port infrastructure – their agency in host countries remains underexplored in the literature on BRI and global production networks (GPNs). This study addresses this gap by combining the strategic coupling framework with agenda-setting theory to analyse how regional actors in Darwin attempted to align local assets with Landbridge's commercial strategy under BRI-linked investment. Based on empirical fieldwork, the study finds that while Darwin possessed distinctive, immobile assets and institutional ambition, the lease structure and broader geopolitical tensions constrained long-term developmental gains. Initial hopes to catalyse economic diversification, population growth and regional connectivity were overridden by multi-scalar power asymmetries and the securitisation of Chinese infrastructure capital. The result was not strategic but structural coupling – characterised by limited embeddedness, abandoned projects and reinforced dependency. The paper contributes to debates on infrastructure-led development by showing that strategic coupling is not guaranteed by asset endowments alone but is a contingent, negotiated process shaped by scalar coherence, institutional capacity and geopolitical alignment. In doing so, it adds nuance to GPN theory by foregrounding host-region agency and the geopolitical context in shaping development outcomes in peripheral settings.