Introduction

In the field of international development, bilateral cooperation mechanisms, where one country offers financial and other support to another to advance the latter’s economic and social development, have been in operation for many years. Many advanced economies have, over the past decades, engaged in various forms of bilateral development cooperation, and China also has for a long time supported the developing world through bilateral means. China has, for example, formulated the ‘Angola Model’ and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to promote development elsewhere (Samy, 2010; Halper, 2010; Tan-Mullins et al., 2010; Begu et al., 2018; Jepson, 2021). Its approaches to development assistance have differed in many ways from those of traditional donors (i.e., advanced economies), for instance focusing on infrastructure projects through the provision of loans, rather than the traditional donors’ preference for aid that is conditioned on the adherence to fiscal, governance, and other conditions. Yet, despite these differences in development approach, China has in more recent years developed a growing interest in engaging traditional donor countries in some of its overseas development projects through collaborative efforts. One important way in which both China and the traditional donor countries work together in international development is the engagement in what this study will refer to as ‘tripartite cooperation’.