Chinese investment in the Sierra Leone telecommunications sector: international financial institutions, neoliberalism and organisational fields

The article investigates the relationship between the Sierra Leonean government and international financial institutions in financial lending for the development of the country’s telecommunications infrastructure. The authors address two interrelated topics: 1) efforts by African countries to free themselves from Western-dominated programmes of neoliberal reform exercised through lending agreements; 2) an evolving economic relationship between African countries and China, particularly with respect to an emerging form of unequal exchange, and a false sense of empowerment in negotiation by African countries. Using the organisational field as a conceptual framework in the context of neoliberalism, the authors examine the power dynamics between foreign capital and Sierra Leone to understand how these relationships are affected and transformed by the availability of China as an alternative source of investment. They find evidence to support the coexistence and interdependency of multiple organisational fields that are affected by field-level changes yielding social, political and economic consequences for all the actors.