How Rising Powers Create Governance Gaps: The Case of Export Credit and the Environment

This article analyzes how rising powers are affecting an important area of global governance at the intersection of trade and environment: export credit. State-backed export credit agencies (ECAs) play a major role in financing large infrastructure and energy projects, particularly in developing countries. Many of these projects carry significant environmental implications, yet there has been little scholarly attention to their governance. Since the 1990s, global governance of the environmental practices of ECAs has been progressively expanded and strengthened via the OECD Arrangement on export credit and Common Approaches for environmental and social due diligence. Recently, however, there has been a dramatic increase in export credit provision by rising powers, such as India and China, who are not members of the OECD nor subject to the Arrangement or Common Approaches. In this article, I argue that existing governance mechanisms have not caught up with the rapidly changing landscape of export credit. Dr...