REASSEMBLING DEVELOPMENT: GLOBAL CHINA IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE MULTISCALAR POLITICS OF COCA CODO SINCLAIR

What does China's "rise" in Latin America tell us about how the project of development is being recast in the twenty-first century? This dissertation is an ethnography of infrastructure centered around one of the largest and most emblematic Chinese projects in the region, Ecuador's Coca Codo Sinclair (CCS) hydroelectric project. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how Chinese finance fueled the environmental and developmental promises of the Ecuadorian state via a hydroelectric boom. Yet through the CCS case I demonstrate how discourses of sustainable development, shaped by geopolitical interests in the era of the "rise of China," are disrupted and transformed across scales. Often portrayed as a failure, CCS is also indispensable for Ecuadorian electricity supply. Further, though frequently characterized as "Chinese," CCS is built upon and within local historical trajectories of development. How do the differentially positioned and multiply scaled actors engaged with Coca Codo Sinclair conceive of its relationship to China as a development actor? How do these understandings (re)assemble the contemporary geopolitics of development? I unpack the contradictions embedded in CCS's associations with extractivism, environmental impact, engineering flaws, and corruption in turn, finding that such associations shift across scales and for differentially positioned actors. I argue through the case of CCS that geopolitical discourses function in constant interaction with the multifarious actors making up development interventions across political scales. Within these heterogeneous assemblages, development discourses are forces on a broader playing field that both impact and react to domestic political interests, historical development trajectories, local economic aspirations, and nonhuman ecological forces. Speaking to the fast-growing literature on Global China, critical geography of development, and Latin American political economy, this dissertation calls attention to the way in which conceptions of development are refracted even in application to a single infrastructural assemblage.