Mutual legitimation attempts: the United Nations and China's Belt and Road Initiative

Abstract

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has become a hallmark of China's global rise. While the BRI has unfolded as a global platform focused on bilateral relations, the Chinese government has also tried to expand links between the BRI and international organizations, notably the United Nations. Available evidence about UN–BRI relations suggests, however, that an initial honeymoon phase with mushrooming projects and public endorsements was followed by a sharp decline in engagement. This article argues that a focus on inter-governor legitimation attempts helps understand the rise and fall of UN–BRI relations. Based on publicly available evidence, internal documentation and stakeholder interviews, it shows how legitimation informed motivations on both sides to invest in UN–BRI relations, and how western opposition subsequently led to UN entities reducing their engagement. Empirically, the article contributes to the literature on China's global role, evolving power relations at the UN, and the proliferation of geopolitically motivated flagship initiatives across UN member states. Conceptually, it speaks to the expanding debate about legitimation in world politics through a more systematic engagement with relational legitimation dynamics. A focus on one-sided or mutual legitimation attempts offers a conceptual tool for analysing how interactions among global governors and their audiences unfold, and how international organizations try (and fail) to strengthen their resilience in light of an increasingly polarized membership.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has become a hallmark of China's global rise.¹ Comprising infrastructure agreements with more than 140 states, the BRI has unfolded as a cross-continental platform primarily focused on bilateral relations. At the same time, the Chinese government has also tried to establish links between the BRI and various international organizations, notably the United Nations. Although China's expanding role across the UN system has received considerable attention,² relations between the UN—as the world's foremost multilateral body—and the BRI as China's most visible global initiative have remained outside the systematic focus of scholarly inquiry.³ It is largely unclear how UN–BRI relations took off, and how they have unfolded. An illustrative review of UN documents (figure 1) suggests that explicit references to the BRI first appeared in 2016, often in the context of UN efforts to support the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). After peaking in 2019, they then started disappearing again from official UN sources. Although UN Secretary-General António Guterres endorsed the BRI in April 2019 as a ‘remarkable’ contribution to the sustainable development agenda,⁴ UN top officials have since remained all but mute on BRI-related engagement.

Figure 1:

Average occurrences of the phrase ‘Belt and Road’ in key UN resolutions and flagship reports (2013–2021)

Source: Author's own elaboration, based on a keyword search of ‘Belt and Road’ in 17 key reports and resolutions on development-related topics issued regularly by the UN, including six resolutions of the UN General Assembly and eleven flagship reports published, among others, by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Development Programme and the Industrial Development Organization. While these documents do not all carry the same political weight, they are widely visible UN texts and provide illustrative insights into discursive patterns over time.⁵

Why and how did relations between the BRI and the UN system expand in the first place? How have they evolved, and why have they done so? This article sets out to answer these questions through a focus on legitimation, that is, the generation of support for political institutions among relevant audiences. By unpacking UN–BRI relations as a paradigmatic case⁶ for how ‘global governors’⁷ use relations with peers to increase their legitimacy, I show how legitimation attempts informed motivations on both sides to expand UN–BRI relations but then met with severe opposition. Conceptually, the analysis suggests that one-sided and mutual legitimation attempts offer an insightful lens for examining how interactions among global governors and their audiences unfold. Empirically, the analysis centres on internal UN documents, publicly available sources—including UN reports, government statements, newspapers and online media—and 49 semi-structured interviews conducted between September 2020 and July 2023 with UN officials, diplomats and policy experts based in China and the United States.

The article first introduces one-sided and mutual legitimation attempts as a conceptual lens for unpacking how global governors try to mobilize relations among themselves for legitimation purposes, and how relevant audiences react to these legitimation attempts. I then provide a systematic mapping of the evolving relations between BRI and 36 UN funds, programmes, specialized agencies, economic commissions and related organizations belonging to the UN Sustainable Development Group (UNSDG). Through the conceptual focus on legitimation attempts, I build on this mapping to examine motivations on both sides behind efforts to expand UN–BRI relations from 2016 onwards and—through a focus on three UNSDG entities—unpack dynamics leading to their subsequent decline.

The findings discussed in this article contribute to ongoing debates about how so-called rising powers try to challenge or reshape established (western-dominated) international organizations,⁸ with China epitomizing the former and the UN system the latter. Empirically, the article charts new ground by providing a systematic mapping of UN–BRI relations, examining factors behind their rise and fall, and embedding these insights into a broader trend where UN member states set up geopolitically motivated flagship initiatives. Conceptually, the article suggests that the expanding scholarly debate on legitimation needs to put a more explicit and systematic focus on relations between agents. The examination of inter-governor—i.e., relational—legitimation attempts helps unpack how international organizations and other global governors try to strengthen their resilience in light of increasingly polarized audiences.

Inter-governor legitimation attempts

Legitimation is about the justification of existence and refers to a ‘social process in which political actors seek to generate and promote, among relevant audiences, generalized support for political institutions’,⁹ usually with reference to normative standards they claim to embrace or embody.¹⁰ Literature on legitimation in world politics highlights the central role of intersubjective perceptions and studies how global governors—including international organizations and their member states—try to shape the perceptions and beliefs of those who matter for them.¹¹ Existing contributions usually focus on agent motivations and audience reactions¹² and identify patterns of justification—centring on normative appropriateness or performance output, for instance—that governors put forward to ensure continued support.¹³

The role relations between global governors play as components of legitimation processes has, however, received limited attention. Although the notion of legitimation itself centres on connections between actors and is thus inherently relational,¹⁴ it is largely unclear whether and how relationships between global governors matter for attempts to increase legitimacy in the eyes of reference communities.¹⁵ While academic scholarship has recently expanded beyond the traditional focus on immediate agent–audience dynamics to include the ‘environment’ of legitimation processes, the consideration of links among global governors—particularly international organizations—has largely focused on ‘isomorphic dynamics’,¹⁶ such as the implications of membership and policy overlap for legitimation discourses.¹⁷ Another strand of scholarship has started engaging with relations between international organizations,¹⁸ but without systematically considering whether and how these relations relate to legitimation. Some exceptions notwithstanding, existing literature is thus mute on how strategic relations between global governors relate to legitimation processes.¹⁹ In fact, a recent contribution highlights that the link between legitimacy and inter-governor relations ‘remains an empirical question that future research could fruitfully investigate’.²⁰

Against this backdrop, I put forward a systematic account for approaching inter-governor relations with regard to legitimation. When it comes to ‘the reasons actors give when they defend or challenge’²¹ a specific global governor, a focus on inter-governor relations asks whether and to what extent the governors involved try to use links among them for generating support for their own standing among relevant audiences. Assuming two global governors A and B, there are four basic ways in which inter-governor relations can relate to legitimation purposes (table 1). The absence of legitimation attempts means that neither A nor B tries to mobilize relations between them to strengthen audience support (1). One-sided legitimation attempts occur when one governor tries to mobilize relations for legitimation purposes, but the other does not (2 and 3). For example, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) might prominently highlight their accreditation to the UN's Economic and Social Council as part of their self-description, while NGOs do not play a role in the Council's self-presentation as an intergovernmental body.²² Finally, mutual legitimation attempts occur when both governors try to use links between them for legitimation purposes (4). As mutuality between two sets of actors means that a specific phenomenon applies in both directions,²³ mutual legitimation attempts refer to reciprocal or coinciding efforts of mobilizing relations between global governors to boost support in the eyes of relevant audiences. For example, transnational corporations might prominently mention their membership in the UN Global Compact to underline their standing as a ‘good’ company, and the Compact might mention its members to underline its relevance across transnational business circles.²⁴

Table 1:

Inter-governor legitimation attempts

Do global governors attempt to mobilize relations among themselves for legitimation purposes?		Global governor B
		NO	YES
Global governor A	NO	1. No legitimation attempts	2. B's one-sided legitimation attempts
	YES	3. A's one-sided legitimation attempts	4. Mutual legitimation attempts

As with all legitimacy-related efforts, the success or failure of inter-governor legitimation attempts hinges upon audience perceptions. While global governors can have different types of internal and external audiences,²⁵ member states constitute the most fundamental reference community for intergovernmental organizations that ultimately rely on the support of their members.²⁶ Overall, the conceptual focus on (the absence, one-sidedness or mutuality of) inter-governor legitimation attempts thus connects two relationality dimensions: relations between governors, on the one hand, and relations between governors and their audiences, on the other. In what follows, I focus on the case of UN–BRI relations to first map the concrete contours of inter-governor relations and then examine the role of audience reactions in how relations have unfolded.

Mapping UN–BRI relations: rise and fall

Announced by Xi Jinping in 2013, China's Belt and Road Initiative has operated as a platform and frame with vague contours for China-sponsored cross-continental infrastructure development.²⁷ Instead of relying on multilateral treaties, the BRI builds on a network of—mostly bilateral—relations with more than 140 states²⁸ committed to the intensification of economic connectivity.²⁹ Without following one overarching strategy, the BRI is not just a Chinese geo-economic initiative, but a set of bilateral and country-to-(sub)region relations that has provided a ‘useful fuzziness’³⁰ for the intensification of relations between Chinese stakeholders and their partners.³¹ Overall, the BRI has been the expression of sometimes diffuse but increasingly influential agency directed at what has been described as the core feature of global governors, namely efforts to promote alternative approaches to tackling global problems and, eventually, transform how international cooperation unfolds.³²

By bringing together more than two-thirds of UN member states, the BRI has become a phenomenon which the UN system has found difficult to ignore. Both the General Assembly and the Security Council have formally mentioned the BRI,³³ and references to UN–BRI relations have made it into political statements at the highest level, with UN Secretary-General Guterres underlining at the 2019 BRI forum that the UN ‘stand[s] ready to support Member States in … achieving a harmonious and sustainable integration of the Belt and Road projects’.³⁴ While China's expanding multilateral engagement covers all UN pillars,³⁵ the BRI has generally been framed by both Chinese and UN sources as resonating strongly with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, suggesting that ‘the world needs to take profit of the Belt and Road Initiative to help close significant financing gaps’ for SDG implementation.³⁶ While some contributions have highlighted the (potential) links between the BRI and the SDGs,³⁷ there has been neither a systematic analysis of UN–BRI relations nor a more in-depth focus on dynamics conditioning them.

Against this backdrop, my mapping of how the 36 UNSDG entities³⁸ have engaged with the BRI since 2015 centres on three dimensions that provide an indicative overview of the publicly visible contours of UN–BRI relations. The first dimension covers formal agreements—such as Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs)—signed by UN entities and Chinese counterparts that explicitly promote the BRI. The second dimension includes formalized BRI-related UN initiatives with budgets and officially recorded activities, such as (often multi-year) projects. The third dimension covers less formalized and more short-term UN engagement with the BRI, such as statements by high-level UN staff, one-off UN publications or official UN participation in BRI events.

As the most exhaustive and systematic account of UN–BRI relations to date, the mapping resonates with the illustrative evidence from UN flagship publications presented above. 30 out of the 36 UN entities under investigation have had publicly visible relations with the BRI. 28 out of 36 entities signed a formal BRI-related agreement with Chinese counterparts between 2016 and 2019 (figure 2). Most of these agreements were MoUs with China's National Development and Reform Commission or other thematically relevant government entities. The UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), UN Volunteers, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) and two regional commissions signed MoUs in 2016. Most other agreements followed in 2017. Since late 2019, no new agreements have been signed. Half of all UN entities under investigation (18 out of 36) set up at least one formalized initiative between 2016 and 2020 (figure 3).³⁹ After plummeting in 2020, no projects with explicit BRI links have been approved since late 2021. Finally, 28 out of 36 entities have had other forms of publicly visible engagement with the BRI; but the number of UN representatives mentioning the BRI in speeches and statements, publishing pieces on the BRI or participating in BRI events significantly decreased in 2020 and then came to an almost total halt (figure 4).⁴⁰

Figure 2:

Number of formal UN–BRI agreements signed (per year), 2015–2023

Source: This and the following two figures have been created by the author based on publicly available data. For an overview of individual UN entities, see table 1.

* In figures 2, 3 and 4, data for 2023 refer to the first half of the year (January to June). In 2021, the International Trade Centre renewed the MoU it had first signed in 2017.

Figure 3:

Number of UN–BRI projects and initiatives (per year, approved or launched), 2015–2023

Figure 4:

Number of other instances of publicly visible UN–BRI engagement (per year), 2015–2023

While some UN entities under investigation have engaged with BRI more than others, the mapping points to a clear pattern (see table 2 at the end of the article): a rather steep increase in relations until 2017, continuing engagement through to 2019, and an—again rather steep—decrease in publicly visible relations from 2020 onwards.⁴¹ Only three entities have approved BRI-related projects since late 2019, and only five have had other forms of publicly visible engagement in the same period. All other UN entities—including those that had been at the forefront of establishing relations with the BRI—have had no publicly visible engagement since late 2019. Across all three dimensions under investigation, UN–BRI relations thus saw a prominent expansion from 2016 onwards that has been followed by an almost complete decline since 2020. Through the focus on inter-governor legitimation attempts outlined in the previous section, this mapping, and the patterns it has identified, provide the backdrop for examining dynamics behind, first, the rise and then the fall of UN–BRI relations.

Table 2:

Mapping three dimensions of UN–BRI relations, 2015–2023

a

In 2021, ITC renewed its 2017 MoU, but no new agreement per se was signed.

b

In 2020, UNDP signed a United Nations Peace and Development Trust Fund-funded project that was explicitly linked to the BRI; but later that year UNDP ceased all BRI-related activities (see above).

c

OHCHR published a report in 2017 that critically engaged with the human rights implications of BRI as a master project.

The rise of UN–BRI relations: mutual legitimation attempts

Why did UN–BRI relations experience such a pronounced rise from 2016 onwards? Some of the obvious factors fail to fully account for this rise. While UN entities that were headed by Chinese nationals in the period under consideration—such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and UNIDO—actively built relations with BRI-related processes,⁴² other UN entities were at least as ready to engage. In terms of financial resources that individual UN entities receive from China, available data suggests that the correlation between funding levels and UN entities' readiness to build relations with BRI is also far from conclusive.⁴³ A UN entity's mandate, in turn, also seems to tell us little about its level of BRI-related engagement. While entities like UNIDO are obvious candidates for collaboration on cross-regional infrastructure projects, relations between the BRI and the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS)⁴⁴ might be unexpected from a purely functional, infrastructure-focused perspective.

As most UN entities under investigation began engaging with the BRI between 2016 and 2019, it is likely that—beyond idiosyncratic factors related to individual cases—there were general motivation patterns behind the rise of UN–BRI relations, such as UN interest in Chinese resources and China's general concern about expanding its global footprint. However, as I outline below with reference to publicly available material and stakeholder interviews, a strong and arguably crucial driving force behind the intensification of UN–BRI relations was the mutual quest for legitimacy.

Avoiding legitimacy drifts: why UN entities wanted to engage with the BRI

Although the UN is still regarded as the world's foremost multilateral organization that combines inclusive state membership with an extensive set of mandates, it faces a range of formidable challenges.⁴⁵ One central aspect of the ‘widening gap between adaptive needs and adaptive capacities’⁴⁶ at the UN is conditioned by the increasing divide between its two most influential member states, the United States and China, reflecting broader tensions between ‘traditional’ and ‘emerging’ powers.⁴⁷ In a context where some argue that ‘it can no longer be taken for granted that [the UN as] a core institution of the post-war international order is needed’,⁴⁸ UN leaders have to make sure they secure continuous member state buy-in. While US support has been a key pillar for the organization since its establishment, China's clout has expanded across the UN system in unprecedented ways over the last two decades, contributing to shifts in member state hierarchies.⁴⁹

The ‘great fracture’⁵⁰ between China and the United States has made it more difficult for the UN to act in ways that cater for all member states. UN leaders are increasingly wary of the fact that they need to entertain links with both sides in order to avoid ‘legitimacy drifts’,⁵¹ i.e., the loss of legitimacy due to failures in adapting to changing member state power patterns. China and the United States are by far the most important contributors to the UN's regular budget⁵² and are leading players among large UN member state groupings: the Western Europe and Others Group (WEOG) for the United States and the Group of 77 (G77) for China.⁵³ Traditionally, western donors have been the most important funders for UN entities; in 2020, more than 80 per cent of funding for the UN development system came from members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee.⁵⁴ Over the last decade, however, China and other countries beyond the West have become more visible players at the UN, also through the expansion of South–South cooperation.⁵⁵ For UN entities, this (incipient) shift in the relative standing of member states has highlighted the need to rethink traditional approaches where ‘southern’ recipients receive ‘northern’ assistance.⁵⁶

In this context, China has played a particularly prominent role for UN entities. As both the world's largest ‘developing country’⁵⁷ and a rising superpower, China has increased its multilateral footprint through a more proactive engagement with a wide range of UN processes, a still modest but growing number of Chinese nationals among UN staff, and an increase in—particularly assessed—contributions to UN budgets.⁵⁸ As part of this trend, the promotion of the BRI presented itself as a key vehicle for expanding links with China. In 2017, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed urged African leaders to ‘take advantage’ of the BRI as ‘one of the world's largest infrastructure initiatives’.⁵⁹ Speaking at the first BRI forum in 2017, Secretary-General Guterres argued that the BRI ‘has immense potential [and] is rooted in a shared vision for global development’⁶⁰ and, at the second BRI forum in 2019, reiterated that ‘the five pillars of the Belt and Road … are intrinsically linked to the 17 [SDGs]’.⁶¹

However, while the UN has welcomed BRI-related development finance, notably regarding infrastructure needs,⁶² the role Chinese funding plays for UN entities should not be overestimated. Beyond China's substantive share of regular budgets, its voluntary contributions—funds that tend to matter much more for UNSDG entities—have remained marginal when compared to those of western donors.⁶³ Interviews suggest that UN motivations behind attempts to intensify engagement with the BRI point to more general and far-reaching concerns than project funds. As a senior UN official put it in late 2020:

We need Chinese money, of course, but that's not the most important thing … If we want to be a world organization, we need all countries on board. We need the big players. Without the US, without China—[imagine] how ridiculous that would be. We need to invest in relations with China and Belt and Road is the most important thing for them right now, and so many other countries are on board … We need to make sure they appreciate the UN … as an ally.⁶⁴

Interviews with officials across different UN entities painted a similar picture: namely, that the UN needed to make a favourable impression in the eyes of BRI allies.⁶⁵ UN officials argued that UN entities had to engage more proactively with China to make sure the UN system would benefit from China's expanding clout across the global South.⁶⁶ Relatedly, others underlined the significant number of member states that had endorsed the BRI: ‘BRI is not only about China … China is the magnet, and so many others want to be part of it. We cannot afford to ignore this.’⁶⁷

What transpires from individual accounts across different UN entities thus coalesces around one fundamental dynamic: when the BRI became a visible Chinese flagship initiative, UN entities started to invest in relations with the BRI—not only to secure material resources, but also to make sure that the UN continued to be appreciated, that is, seen as a relevant player by member states across the developed/developing divide. In line with the above discussion of legitimation through inter-governor relations, the onset of UN–BRI relations thus stemmed from an—at least one-sided—attempt to mobilize relations with the BRI for legitimation. For UN decision-makers, it seemed unwise (or indeed impossible) to ignore the BRI if they wanted to be able to count on the long-term support of not only western countries but also China and (the majority of) UN member states that had joined BRI-related endeavours. UN officials stated in interviews that they had assumed western powers would not be particularly enthusiastic about UN entities endorsing the BRI, but that the focus on technical support and synergies with SDG implementation would ensure that UN–BRI relations remained under the radar of geopolitical tensions.⁶⁸

A force for good: why China wanted UN endorsement for the BRI

For China, the BRI has been an integral part of Xi's shift towards ‘major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics’.⁶⁹ Official Chinese voices usually hold that the BRI is a boon for the world as it increases connectivity and thus prosperity.⁷⁰ In Chinese circles, public discussions about UN–BRI relations have mostly centred on the BRI's potential as an instrument to enhance the implementation of the SDGs.⁷¹ Collaborative work by UN entities and Chinese think tanks has made similar arguments.⁷²

Identifying underlying motivations behind the expansion of UN–BRI links, however, requires a brief look at the variety of Chinese agents involved. References to ‘China’ are often implicitly used as an umbrella category for a variety of players. In the absence of one ‘central coordination mechanism’,⁷³ BRI-related processes with UN entities have been led by different parts of the Chinese bureaucracy, notably the department in charge of China's western region at the National Development and Reform Commission as well as sections in the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other government bodies.⁷⁴ While all of these actors are aware that ‘BRI is the big game in town and … [they] cannot afford to not be part of it’,⁷⁵ their particular motivations for engaging with the BRI differ. For state-owned enterprises, contracts for infrastructure projects abroad are arguably key. The Ministry of Commerce, in turn, is interested in the long-term expansion of export markets; and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs seems mostly concerned with strengthening China's diplomatic ties for geopolitical purposes.⁷⁶

Chinese scholars following the BRI since 2013 have also observed a shift in China's emphasis regarding UN–BRI relations. Initially, functional capacity-related questions had played a role for Chinese authorities to bring UN entities on board. For the Ministry of Commerce, in particular, cooperating with UNDP allowed them to rely on UN expertise and country-office networks while expanding their ties with partners in Africa and across Asia.⁷⁷ This, however, seems to have changed. As a Chinese academic put it in early 2021:

The international climate has become more difficult; now there is one key reason for why [China] seeks for the BRI to engage with UNDP and other agencies: BRI needs to be seen as a force for good outside China; … the UN can help to transport that image.⁷⁸

This focus on making use of relations with the UN in order to strengthen beliefs in the benign quality of BRI-related intentions resonates with a more general foreign-policy impetus at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to expand cross-regional support for China-led alliances. In line with other attempts to project a positive image of China as a responsible power,⁷⁹ UN support for the BRI is supposed to signal—particularly to critics—that China is a benevolent force that combines its own quest for economic growth with support for poorer countries.⁸⁰ Interviews with Chinese and China-based experts overlap with one of the rare scholarly accounts discussing UN–BRI relations in that ‘[t]he participation of UN agencies and related organizations, in joint pursuit of the achievement of the SDGs with China, may in turn maximize BRI's positive impact and increase the acceptability of BRI globally’.⁸¹

Investing in the expansion of UN–BRI relations was thus part of a bid to boost the legitimacy of Chinese-led initiatives, that is, demonstrate to international audiences that China was a trusted and reliable partner, and convince them that the world had only to gain from the BRI. Like the UN, the Chinese side of UN–BRI relations was thus invested in mobilizing inter-governor relations for legitimation purposes. Similar to UN entities, the hope among Chinese officials was that the sustainable development umbrella would ensure that UN–BRI relations remained beyond geopolitical frictions and, ideally, would contribute to making the BRI appear less controversial.⁸²

While the first years following the announcement of the BRI in 2013 did not see any references to the BRI by the UN or references to the UN in BRI-related sources (i.e., an absence of legitimation attempts), this changed with the global expansion of the BRI and an increasing UN focus on strengthening partnerships with China under the sustainable development agenda. From 2016 onwards, both sides were engaged in mutual legitimation attempts, investing in the expansion of UN–BRI relations to generate support for their standing among member state audiences.

The fall of UN–BRI relations: mutual legitimation attempts meet western audiences

If the expansion of UN–BRI relations was motivated on both sides by the wish to generate support among UN member states, why did these relations experience a rapid decline from 2020 onwards? China, for one, was not the driving force behind this decline. A review of publicly available documents and interviews with Chinese stakeholders suggests that the Chinese government continued to be committed to further expanding UN–BRI relations. Throughout 2020 and into 2021, and despite pandemic-related challenges, China had expanded the sustainable development line of its Peace and Development Trust Fund at the UN, ready to approve a new set of BRI-related projects.⁸³ Instead, it was on the UN side that—mostly behind closed doors—BRI-related engagement became a rockier endeavour.

In order to provide an account of dynamics that were specific to individual UN entities but reflect an overarching pattern, this section turns to the BRI trajectory of three UN entities: UNEP, UNDP and UNIDO. While all three are UNSDG members, they differ across a number of dimensions that make their combined analysis an insightful undertaking for examining patterns in the evolution of UN–BRI relations. With a broad development-related mandate, UNDP has long been sympathetic to China but has also been a stronghold of western donors. UNIDO, in turn, has seen the G77 adopt a more powerful role in the absence of major western powers. Like UNIDO, UNEP is one of the smaller UN entities in terms of budget size; but it has a mandate that most UN member states proactively embrace. While UNEP, UNDP and UNIDO thus reflect some of the diversity within the UN system, all three signed BRI-related MoUs in 2016, showed active engagement with BRI until 2019, but then ceased their publicly visible support. The conceptual focus on the audiences of legitimation attempts allows us to unpack the major factor that was at work in all three entities, albeit in different ways: the mounting opposition of (mostly) western member states.

UNEP and the BRI: overtures cut short

UNEP was an early mover on UN–BRI relations. Under the leadership of Erik Solheim (2016–2018)—a widely known Sinophile from Norway—UNEP quickly became a UN–BRI champion. Following the signature of a MoU in 2016 with the Chinese Ministry of Ecology and Environment,⁸⁴ UNEP was a key partner for the 2017 announcement of the BRI International Green Development Coalition, established to ‘ensure that the Belt and Road brings long-term green and sustainable development to all concerned countries’.⁸⁵ As one observer put it, ‘Solheim wanted to make Belt and Road a priority … to make UNEP fit for the future, he would have done anything to make sure China and other [BRI member] states see UNEP as a partner of choice’.⁸⁶

However, member states wary about Chinese influence started challenging UNEP's engagement with China outside the organization's programme of work.⁸⁷ Critical US voices referred to UNEP efforts on greening the BRI as ‘a clever bit of PR jujitsu’,⁸⁸ particularly in light of the negative environmental externalities of large infrastructure projects and the obvious geo-economic prerogatives behind the initiative. Western donors—including the United States and Nordic countries—increasingly saw Solheim as ‘too close to China’,⁸⁹ and Solheim's prominent support for the BRI was one of the reasons that eventually led to mounting western pressure and his resignation in 2018.⁹⁰ As a western diplomat recalled: ‘When Solheim left … that meant that [UNEP's] China strategy could be reworked; thank God, it was high time.’⁹¹

Indeed, UNEP's engagement with the BRI and China-specific South–South schemes became less visible following Solheim's departure. After some back-and-forth, the continuing criticism from western states led UNEP in 2020 to discontinue some China-related funding mechanisms and scrap its South–South cooperation unit altogether.⁹² UNEP staff members now need to ‘make sure all member states are on board with what we do, and how we do it’,⁹³ meaning that references to the BRI have to be avoided. While it was not that long ago that UN voices had praised the BRI ‘as an important space where green principles can be reflected in green action’,⁹⁴ UNEP's support for the BRI now seems to belong to the past.

UNDP and the BRI: succumbing to pushbacks

BRI-related tensions also erupted at UNDP. Internal documentation shows that the draft framework document on UNDP–China cooperation inside China—which had included a focus on supporting China's development-related efforts abroad—caused consternation among member states at UNDP executive board meetings in 2020. In a rather unusual move, the draft documents negotiated between UNDP and China as host government did not receive executive board approval as scheduled.⁹⁵ In a written statement, the US government highlighted not only its ‘serious concerns regarding the content and development’ of the UN coordination framework for China ‘through a rushed, opaque process without consultations with all relevant stakeholders’ but also underlined their disapproval of UN entities supporting the BRI. More specifically, the United States sought ‘assurances that UNDP is not directly or inadvertently … promoting or advancing China's signature foreign policy or economic diplomacy initiatives, including “the Belt and Road Initiative”’.⁹⁶

Other WEOG statements followed the same logic. French representatives underlined that ‘France would like to request the deletion of references to the belt and road initiative … which is not meant to become a criteria [sic] determining UNDP's actions.’⁹⁷ Japan, in turn, asked for BRI-related passages to be removed entirely;⁹⁸ and India highlighted UNDP's prime responsibility to ensure that member states had a say over all BRI-related processes unfolding in their territory. With implicit reference to China, Indian representatives also stated that all processes falling under the BRI needed to be ‘carried out without violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other member states’.⁹⁹ Following amendments made by UNDP to the initial draft, US representatives reiterated that ‘we remain concerned about UNDP's ongoing promotion of the BRI … and the activities that “facilitate global experience” with China and partner countries … that specifically aimed to promote investment under the BRI’.¹⁰⁰

As all references to the BRI were eventually removed from the 2021–2025 UNDP country programme document for China,¹⁰¹ UNDP and the Chinese government were set to continue their collaboration as planned. By mid-2021, however, US representatives had ‘threatened to withdraw voluntary contributions from the organization if UNDP continued to work on BRI-related initiatives’.¹⁰² As a result, UNDP's leadership decided to dismantle the team working on BRI topics at UNDP's Asia–Pacific hub.¹⁰³ Despite the importance it had long attached to the partnership with China,¹⁰⁴ UNDP thus succumbed to pressure from the United States, a key player among UNDP's donor audience.

UNIDO and the BRI: silent readjustments

While western countries have been important providers for both UNEP and UNDP, they have played a less visible role at UNIDO. UNIDO heads had always come from the ‘developing world’ and in the 1990s and early 2000s a range of western states—including the United States, the United Kingdom and France—withdrew from the organization amid concerns about UNIDO's performance. Since then, China has played a central role at the organization. UNIDO's flagship initiative ‘Programme for Country Partnership’¹⁰⁵ builds largely on China's experience of developing industrial parks as a nucleus of national development. The implementation of this programme—popular among member states in the global South—has exclusively taken place in countries that have signed free trade agreements with China.¹⁰⁶ Also, between 2013 and 2021 UNIDO was led by Li Yong, a Chinese national, further intensifying Chinese influence. An increasing number of Chinese staff now work at different levels of the organization, prompting a member state representative to summarize UNIDO's set-up until late 2021 as ‘nothing goes without the Chinese—they call the shots’.¹⁰⁷

Overall, UNIDO thus seemed to present a most likely case for a UN entity strongly supporting the BRI. And indeed, like UNEP and UNDP, UNIDO was among the first UN entities to sign an MoU with the Chinese government in 2016, after which it announced a number of BRI-related initiatives. However, these initial overtures did not lead to an expanding BRI agenda. As a UN official put it:

BRI was a thing [for UNIDO], but then they realised that it was too complex, too controversial; [western] member states were not happy about it, it just didn't seem worth it. I don't think there was any pressure … but it seems like [UNIDO] leadership decided to keep a low profile.¹⁰⁸

Even in a context where western influence has been notoriously low, and under the leadership of a Chinese Director-General, by 2021 UNIDO had scaled back references to the BRI in its programming and events.¹⁰⁹ Member state representatives and UN officials confirmed in interviews that there had been no explicit attempts by western countries to intervene. Still, UNIDO's management decided to drop or rebrand initiatives that had initially been tailored towards BRI engagement, arguably because it wanted to pre-emptively reduce the potential for conflict.¹¹⁰ Interviewees suggested that other reasons behind this shift were not only the still important voluntary contributions UNIDO received from member states such as Japan and Germany, but also the prospect of incentivizing the United States to rejoin the organization.¹¹¹ Insights from UNIDO thus suggest that even in a multilateral context with strong Chinese presence, the potential of western contestations reduced the space for UN–BRI relations.

From mutual to one-sided legitimation attempts? Western opposition and China–UN relations

UN–BRI relations have seen different stages of attempts to mobilize inter-governor relations for legitimation purposes. Initially, mutual legitimation attempts were important drivers behind the expansion of UN–BRI relations. Insights from UNEP, UNDP and UNIDO suggest that, faced with western opposition, UN stakeholders decided—reactively or pre-emptively—to scale back their engagement. Recent BRI-related documents continue to reference the UN and the SDGs,¹¹² highlighting the BRI's embeddedness into multilateral frameworks. However, these—now one-sided—legitimation attempts are of a limited nature, also because UN–BRI relations have effectively come to a halt. With regard to states publicly wary of China's expanding clout—notably WEOG member states, Japan and India—the expansion of UN–BRI relations has not contributed to an increase in legitimacy for UN entities or the BRI, but has rather fuelled concerns about the UN's ‘curious role in China's public relations campaign to sell the Belt and Road to the developing world.’¹¹³ For western pundits critical of China's rise, the increasing clout the BRI initially enjoyed at the UN was part of a broader development where ‘Beijing has moved expeditiously to impose its illiberal values on international organizations [and] has made progress in transforming the U.N. into a platform for its foreign policy agenda.’¹¹⁴

For UN entities, the increasing politicization of UN–BRI relations stands in stark contrast to initial motivations of enlarging their member state support base without undermining western backing. For China, the hope that UN support would help smooth the image of BRI and promote it as a global force for good in the eyes of both supporters and critics has, at least among western powers, failed to materialize. However, this does not mean that UN member states generally oppose the BRI. Countries that have signed up for BRI-related initiatives may not have taken an explicit stance to publicly defend the BRI in UN board meetings,¹¹⁵ but they have also not joined in what some refer to as western-led ‘China-bashing’.¹¹⁶ A broad de facto coalition of G77 member states across Asia, Africa and Latin America, together with countries in southern and eastern Europe, seems to have silently approved of UN engagement with BRI-related processes.¹¹⁷

The decline of UN–BRI relations thus does not change the fact that perceptions of the BRI differ widely across member state audiences, also because Chinese stakeholders have come to use the BRI as a ‘multifunctional political slogan’¹¹⁸ for different processes. From a local perspective, the legitimacy of the BRI arguably depends less on broad geopolitical considerations and more on the (perceived) success or failure of specific projects.¹¹⁹ At the global level, it is a minority of member states that has taken issue with UN–BRI relations, but this minority—consisting mostly of western donors—is (still) potent enough to control key UN processes.

Taken together, UN–BRI relations highlight how legitimation concerns can drive inter-governor relations, and how fundamental divisions among relevant audiences make legitimation attempts inherently challenging. Given that perceptions among reference communities are key for the success of legitimacy claims,¹²⁰ legitimation strategies that unfold within a fractured social space are unlikely to lead to large-scale success. For the UN, the decline of BRI-related legitimation attempts exemplifies the general challenge of catering for both sides of divided member state audiences. While UN entities can currently not afford to turn their back on major western donors to embrace the ‘shared destiny’ of ‘multilateralism with Chinese characteristics’,¹²¹ most UN leaders have recognized that ignoring China is not an option, and that turning their back on Chinese initiatives will become increasingly costly.¹²²

From a Chinese perspective, having the UN on board matters on a very general level, as ‘potential munition against those who blame China for being a rogue state’.¹²³ Determined to ensure the availability of this (soft) power resource, the Chinese government seems to have learned from the controversies its infrastructure initiative has generated. In September 2021, Xi announced—this time at the UN itself—that China would invite member states to join a new endeavour called the Global Development Initiative (GDI). Framed in vague and inclusive terms, the GDI's official purpose—unlike that of the BRI—does not centre on economic infrastructure investment, but is presented as garnering support for SDG implementation.¹²⁴ Through framings that highlight multilateral commitment, the GDI helps China to link its global ambitions to UN frameworks.¹²⁵ As a Chinese official has argued, ‘BRI is more about hard infrastructure but GDI is more about the soft side—about livelihood, technology transfer, capacity building, rules and standards.’¹²⁶

Western member states have refused to see references to the GDI included in UN documents, echoing their opposition to the BRI.¹²⁷ Yet a number of UN officials and diplomats have referred to the GDI as ‘a really smart move’¹²⁸ on behalf of China. More than 70 member states have joined the official Group of Friends of the GDI,¹²⁹ and western member states have found it considerably more difficult to pinpoint what exactly it is that they dislike about this multilateral initiative. As with other political projects at the UN,¹³⁰ the Chinese government has shown a capacity to adapt to feedback and refine its strategies. This is also reflected in China's Global Security Initiative, announced in 2022, which has been mentioned by Chinese representatives in different UN forums and, together with the Global Civilization Initiative, complements the GDI in opening a new chapter of China's multilateral engagement strategies.¹³¹ Legitimation attempts—this time mostly one-sided—are thus again resurfacing, while UN entities remain more cautious about potential western backlash. Based on China's commitment to the UN as the ‘core’¹³² of the multilateral system, efforts to mobilize UN links with China-led initiatives for legitimation purposes are thus set to continue.

Conclusion

This article has argued that a focus on (reactions to) attempts at mobilizing inter-governor relations for legitimation purposes helps us understand the rise and fall of UN–BRI relations. I have shown how UN entities expanded relations with the BRI to assure the BRI-affiliated majority of UN member states that they would remain legitimate multilateral bodies in a changing global power context, despite their strong dependence on western donors. China, in turn, wanted to connect the BRI to UN processes to increase its legitimacy in the eyes of the entire UN membership and—in the face of sustained criticism—display its standing as a global force for good. Legitimation thus informed motivations on both sides to invest in UN–BRI relations, and negative reactions by—primarily western—member state audiences subsequently led to most UN entities discontinuing their engagement.

Contrary to arguments that China is ‘remaking the UN in its own image’,¹³³ this article has shown how a campaign to establish China's global flagship initiative in UN circles effectively came to a halt when faced with sustained western opposition. The widening gulf between a (mostly) western camp wary of Chinese influence and the BRI-affiliated majority of UN member states highlights the extent to which broad-based legitimacy is a scarce good in world politics. Through its more recent triple set of global initiatives, China has shown that it knows how to improve its multilateral strategies, but it will need to convince the developing country majority at the UN that China-led processes come with a palpable benefit for all. Western member states, in turn, need to rethink their long-term strategy with the UN system, also because their current dominance—mostly backed by the power of the purse—is unlikely to remain unaltered by ongoing power shifts.

For the UN, the rise and fall of UN–BRI relations—that is, the shift from mutual to (limited) one-sided legitimation attempts—epitomize current challenges in trying to cater for the interests of all its members. The experience with the BRI suggests that UN entities have to invest considerably more effort into finding an (evolving) balance between western and Chinese interests in the negotiation of programmatic guidelines, the framing of cooperation activities and the composition of funding streams. This also means reviewing whether and how UN entities should engage with endeavours by (groups of) member states designed to counter Chinese initiatives. The European Union's Global Gateway, for instance, was established in 2022 as an infrastructure-focused response to the BRI and has recently been praised by the UN deputy secretary-general as ‘an important solution’ for SDG implementation.¹³⁴ Focusing on cultural linkages across the Indian Ocean, India's Project Mausam has tried to mobilize relations with UNESCO and the world heritage regime as part of the Indian government's reactions to China's expanding footprint in the region.¹³⁵ For the UN, supporting one set of these geopolitically motivated initiatives more than others might lead to serious reputational costs and undermine its long-term legitimacy among an increasingly diverse membership.

Beyond its relevance for policy debates and academic discussions about China, the UN and power shifts in the multilateral system, the case of UN–BRI relations also holds an important lesson for scholarly work on legitimation. Moving beyond a focus on isomorphism in organizational fields where global governors react and adapt to their peers' legitimation discourses,¹³⁶ this article has shown that strategic relations between governors—which translate into official documents and materialize through budgets and project activities—can be an integral part of legitimation processes. Changes in attempts to mobilize inter-governor relations for legitimation purposes—such as shifts between one-sided and mutual legitimation attempts or the abandonment of relational legitimation efforts altogether—provide an important seismograph for the global geographies of legitimacy, where multilateral bodies, member states and other governors try to generate support from relevant reference communities. Future research should integrate a focus on inter-governor legitimation attempts in order to better map and understand the contours and implications of relations among global governors and their audiences.

Footnotes

1

Huang Yiping, ‘Understanding China's Belt & Road Initiative: motivation, framework and assessment’, China Economic Review, vol. 40, 2016, pp. 314–21, http://doi.org/10.1016/j.chieco.2016.07.007; Lee Jones and Jinghan Zeng, ‘Understanding China's “Belt and Road Initiative”: beyond “grand strategy” to a state transformation analysis’, Third World Quarterly 40: 8, 2019, pp. 1415–39, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2018.1559046.

2

Rosemary Foot, China, the UN, and human protection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Courtney J. Fung and Shing-hon Lam, ‘Staffing the United Nations: China's motivations and prospects’, International Affairs 97: 4, 2021, pp. 1143–63, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab071; Max-Otto Baumann, Sebastian Haug and Silke Weinlich, ‘From developing country to superpower? China, power shifts and the United Nations development pillar’, Global Policy 15: S2, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.13260.

3

For a brief contribution in Chinese, see Zhang Guihong, ‘The United Nations and Belt and Road Initiative’, Fudan Journal, vol. 5, 2020, pp. 168–78; see also Donald J. Lewis, Xiaohua Yang, Diana Moise and Stephen John Roddy, ‘Dynamic synergies between China's Belt and Road Initiative and the UN's Sustainable Development Goals’, Journal of International Business Policy, vol. 4, 2021, pp. 58–79, https://doi.org/10.1057/s42214-020-00082-6.

4

António Guterres, ‘Secretary-General's remarks at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation’, United Nations, 26 April 2019, https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2019-04-26/secretary-generals-remarks-the-opening-ceremony-of-the-belt-and-road-forum-for-international-cooperation. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 23 Jan. 2024.)

5

See Max-Otto Baumann, Sebastian Haug and Silke Weinlich, China's expanding engagement with the United Nations development pillar: the selective long-term approach of a programme country superpower (Bonn: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and German Institute of Development and Sustainability, 2022), p. 21, https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/iez/19692.pdf.

6

Bent Flyvbjerg, ‘Five misunderstandings about case-study research’, Qualitative Inquiry 12: 2, 2006, pp. 219–45, https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800405284363.

7

Deborah Avant, Martha Finnemore and Susan Sell, eds, Who governs the globe? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

8

Andreas Kruck and Bernhard Zangl, ‘The adjustment of international institutions to global power shifts: a framework for analysis’, Global Policy 11: 3, 2020, pp. 5–16, https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12865; Jonas Tallberg and Soetkin Verhaegen, ‘The legitimacy of international institutions among rising and established powers’, Global Policy 11: 3, 2020, pp. 115–26, https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12842.

9

Klaus Dingwerth et al., International organizations under pressure: legitimating global governance in challenging times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 5.

10

Tobias Lenz and Fredrik Söderbaum, ‘The origins of legitimation strategies in international organizations: agents, audiences and environments’, International Affairs 99: 3, 2023, pp. 899–920, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiad110.

11

Sarah von Billerbeck, ‘Organizational narratives and self-legitimation in international organizations’, International Affairs 99: 3, 2023, pp. 963–81, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiac263; Martin Binder and Monika Heupel, ‘The politics of legitimation in international organizations’, Journal of Global Security Studies 6: 3, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogaa033; Dingwerth et al., International organizations under pressure; Jonas Tallberg and Michael Zürn, ‘The legitimacy and legitimation of international organizations: introduction and framework’, The Review of International Organizations 14: 4, 2019, pp. 581–606, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-018-9330-7.

12

Magdalena Bexell, Kristina Jönsson and Anders Uhlin, Legitimation and delegitimation in global governance: practices, justifications, and audiences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), part 4.

13

Bexell, Jönsson and Uhlin, Legitimation and delegitimation in global governance, part 3.

14

Monika Heupel, ‘Relational legitimation in dense institutional environments: the case of the UN Special Procedures’, unpublished manuscript, pp. 4–5.

15

For references on inter-governor relations and legitimation, see Julia Black, ‘Constructing and contesting legitimacy and accountability in polycentric regulatory regimes’, Regulation & Governance 2: 2, 2008, pp. 137–164, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-5991.2008.00034.x.

16

Lenz and Söderbaum, ‘The origins of legitimation strategies’, p. 914.

17

Tobias Lenz and Henning Schmidtke, ‘Agents, audiences and peers: why international organizations diversify their legitimation discourse’, International Affairs 99: 3, 2023, pp. 921–40 at p. 923, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiac323. In comparison, see Black, ‘Constructing and contesting’.

18

Richard Clark, ‘Pool or duel? Cooperation and competition among international organizations’, International Organization 75: 4, 2021, pp. 1133–53, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818321000229; Diana Panke and Sören Stapel, ‘Cooperation between international organizations: demand, supply, and restraint’, The Review of International Organizations, vol. 19, 2024, pp. 269–305, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-023-09506-3.

19

On ‘mutual legitimacy enhancement’ and ‘legitimacy networks’, see Black, ‘Constructing and contesting’, p. 147.

20

Panke and Stapel, ‘Cooperation between international organizations’, p. 33.

21

Dingwerth et al., International organizations under pressure, p. 5.

22

Rahim Moloo, ‘The quest for legitimacy in the United Nations: a role for NGOs?’, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs 16: 1, 2011, pp. 1–40, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2036248.

23

Volker Heins, Christine Unrau and Kristine Avram, ‘Gift-giving and reciprocity in global society: introducing Marcel Mauss in international studies’, Journal of International Political Theory 14: 2, 2018, pp. 126–44, https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088218757807.

24

Georg Kell and John Ruggie, ‘Global markets and social legitimacy: the case of the “global” compact’, in Daniel Drache, ed., The market or the public domain: redrawing the line (New York: Routledge, 2001), ch. 13.

25

von Billerbeck, ‘Organizational narratives’; Binder and Heupel, ‘The politics of legitimation’.

26

Kenneth W. Abbott and Duncan Snidal, ‘Why states act through formal international organizations’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 42: 1, 1998, pp. 3–32, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002798042001001.

27

Huang, ‘Understanding China's Belt & Road Initiative’.

28

Green Finance & Development Center, ‘Countries of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)’, 2023, https://greenfdc.org/countries-of-the-belt-and-road-initiative-bri.

29

Malin Oud and Katja Drinhausen, eds, ‘Decoding China dictionary’, 2023, https://decodingchina.eu.

30

Thomas P. Narins and John Agnew, ‘Missing from the map: Chinese exceptionalism, sovereignty regimes and the Belt Road Initiative’, Geopolitics 25: 4, 2020, pp. 809–37, https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2019.1601082.

31

Jones and Zeng, ‘Understanding China's “Belt and Road Initiative”’.

32

Avant, Finnemore and Sell, eds, Who governs the globe?

33

United Nations General Assembly, The situation in Afghanistan: resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 17 November 2016, A/RES/71/9, 2016, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/851375; United Nations Security Council, Resolution 2344 (2017). Adopted by the Security Council at its 7902nd meeting, on 17 March 2017, S/RES/2344 (2017), 2017, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/862351.

34

Guterres, ‘Secretary-General's remarks at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation’, 2019.

35

See Courtney J. Fung and Shing-hon Lam, ‘Mixed report card: China's influence at the United Nations’, Lowy Institute, 18 Dec. 2022, https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/mixed-report-card-china-s-influence-united-nations.

36

Guterres, ‘Secretary-General's remarks at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation’, 2019.

37

Jing Gu, Hannah Corbett and Melissa Leach, ‘Introduction: the Belt and Road Initiative and the Sustainable Development Goals: opportunities and challenges’, IDS Bulletin, 2019, p. 6, https://doi.org/10.19088/1968-2019.136; Huang, ‘Understanding China's Belt & Road Initiative’; Xue Lan and Weng Lingfei, ‘Thoughts on China's Belt and Road Initiative for promoting UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals’, Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences 33: 1, 2018, pp. 40–47, https://doi.org/10.16418/j.issn.1000-3045.2018.01.005; see also Lewis et al., ‘Dynamic synergies’.

38

UN Sustainable Development Group, ‘Who we are’, 2024, https://unsdg.un.org/about/who-we-are. The World Intellectual Property Organisation only joined the UNSDG in 2022 and is not included in the mapping.

39

Data refer to the year a project was approved or launched.

40

Exceptions have been the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (in 2022) and the International Labour Organization (in 2023).

41

While the COVID–19 pandemic played a role in reducing BRI-related UN engagement in 2020, and the signature of formal agreements might have reached a natural saturation point, these factors cannot explain the almost complete decline of UN–BRI relations across all dimensions.

42

See Kristine Lee, ‘It's not just the WHO: how China is moving on the whole U.N.’, Politico, 15 April 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/15/its-not-just-the-who-how-china-is-moving-on-the-whole-un-189029.

43

Based on UN data, used for a similar exercise in Sebastian Haug, Mainstreaming South–South and triangular cooperation: work in progress at the United Nations, DIE Discussion Paper 15 (Bonn: German Institute for Development Policy, 2021), p. 32, https://www.idos-research.de/uploads/media/DP_15.2021.pdf.

44

Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS), ‘China's Belt and Road initiative to play a key role in overcoming global health challenges’, 21 Aug. 2017, https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/2017/august/20170821_belt-and-road.

45

Thomas G. Weiss and Sam Daws, eds, The Oxford handbook of the United Nations, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

46

Dingwerth et al, International organizations under pressure, p. 3.

47

Kruck and Zangl, ‘The adjustment of international institutions’; Tallberg and Verhaegen, ‘The legitimacy of international institutions’.

48

Dingwerth et al., International organizations under pressure, p. 1; and see Tallberg and Zürn, ‘The legitimacy and legitimation of international organizations’.

49

Sebastian Haug, Rosemary Foot and Max-Otto Baumann, ‘Power shifts in international organisations: China at the United Nations’, Global Policy 15: S2, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.13368.

50

United Nations General Assembly, ‘Warning against ‘great fracture’, Secretary-General opens annual General Assembly debate with call to avoid zero-sum politics, revive United Nations values’, GA/12183, 24 Sept. 2019, https://press.un.org/en/2019/ga12183.doc.htm.

51

Matthew D. Stephen, ‘Legitimacy deficits of international organizations: design, drift, and decoupling at the UN Security Council’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 31: 1, 2018, pp. 96–121, https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2018.1476463.

52

United Nations, Committee on Contributions, ‘Scale of assessments’, https://www.un.org/en/ga/contributions/scale.shtml.

53

See Thomas Weiss, ‘Moving beyond North–South theatre’, Third World Quarterly 30: 2, 2009, pp. 271–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436590802681033.

54

Max-Otto Baumann and Silke Weinlich, ‘Funding the UN’, in Stephen Browne and Thomas Weiss, eds, Routledge handbook on the UN and development (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 151–64.

55

Haug, Mainstreaming South–South and triangular cooperation.

56

See United Nations Development Programme, The rise of the South: human progress in a diverse world (New York: UNDP, 2013).

57

‘China's international development cooperation in the new era’, Xinhua, 10 Jan. 2021, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-01/10/c_139655400.htm.

58

Fung and Lam, ‘Mixed report card’.

59

Amina J. Mohammed, ‘Deputy Secretary-General's remarks to African Union Summit’, 3 July 2017, https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/deputy-secretary-general/statement/2017-07-03/deputy-secretary-generals-remarks-african-union-summit-prepared-for-delivery; see also Colum Lynch, ‘China enlists U.N. to promote its Belt and Road project’, Foreign Policy, 10 May 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/10/china-enlists-u-n-to-promote-its-belt-and-road-project.

60

António Guterres, ‘Remarks at the opening of the Belt and Road Forum’, 14 May 2017, https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2017-05-14/secretary-general%E2%80%99s-belt-and-road-forum-remarks.

61

Guterres, ‘Secretary-General's remarks at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation’, 2019.

62

See UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, ‘At China's Belt and Road Forum, Guterres calls for “inclusive, sustainable and durable” development’, 26 April 2019, https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/sustainable/china-belt-and-road-forum.html.

63

Fung and Lam, ‘Mixed report card’.

64

Interview with a senior UN official, Nov. 2020.

65

Interviews with UN officials, Sept. 2020, June and July 2023.

66

Interview with UN officials, April 2021.

67

Interview with a UN official, Oct. 2021.

68

Interviews with UN officials, Oct. 2021, March 2022 and June 2023.

69

‘Xi urges breaking new ground in major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics’, Xinhua, 24 June 2018, http://xinhuanet.com/english/2018-06/24/c_137276269.htm.

70

‘Xi focus—quotable quotes: Xi Jinping on Belt and Road Initiative’, Xinhua, 7 Sept. 2020, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-09/07/c_139349475.htm; see also Michael Dunford and Weidong Liu, ‘Chinese perspectives on the Belt and Road Initiative’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 12: 1, 2019, pp. 145–67, https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsy032.

71

Xue and Weng, ‘Thoughts on China's Belt and Road Initiative’; Zhang Yunbi, ‘Leaders hail Piraeus as BRI flagship’, China Daily, 12 Nov. 2019, https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201911/12/WS5dc9e7f2a310cf3e35576b46.html.

72

Balasz Horvath, Identifying development dividends along the Belt and Road Initiative (Beijing: UNDP and China Center for International Economic Exchanges, 2016); United Nations Development Programme and China Center for International Economic Exchanges, The Belt and Road Initiative: a new means to transformative global governance towards sustainable development (Beijing: UNDP and CCIEE, 2017).

73

Huang, ‘Understanding China's Belt & Road Initiative’, p. 314.

74

Chinese state-owned enterprises have played a major role in BRI-related initiatives (see Jones and Zhen, ‘Understanding China's “Belt and Road Initiative”’), but apparently not in those with prominent UN engagement.

75

Interview with a Chinese expert, April 2021.

76

Interviews with Chinese officials and experts, Oct. 2020 to April 2021.

77

See the section on China's global engagement at United Nations Development Programme, ‘About us: UNDP in China’, 2024, https://www.undp.org/china/about-us.

78

Interview with a Chinese academic, April 2021.

79

For instance, see Foot, China, the UN, and human protection.

80

Interviews with Chinese experts, April 2021 to March 2022.

81

Lewis et al., ‘Dynamic synergies’, p. 5.

82

Interviews with Chinese experts, March 2022 and June 2023.

83

Interviews with UN officials, Feb. and March 2022; see also United Nations Peace and Development Trust Fund, ‘2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development sub-fund’, https://www.un.org/en/unpdf/2030asd.

84

UN Environment Programme, ‘Memorandum of understanding between the United Nations Environment Programme and Ministry of Environmental Protection of the People's Republic of China on building a green “Belt and Road”’, 2016, https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/25336/MOU%20-%20Belt%20and%20Road%20Strategy%20-Dec%202016.pdf.

85

UN Environment Programme, ‘The Belt and Road Initiative International Green Development Coalition (BRIGC)’, https://www.unep.org/regions/asia-and-pacific/regional-initiatives/belt-and-road-initiative-international-green.

86

Interview with a member state representative, March 2021.

87

Haug, Mainstreaming South–South and triangular cooperation.

88

Lee, ‘It's not just the WHO’.

89

Interview with a member state representative, Oct. 2020.

90

See Damian Carrington, ‘UN environment chief resigns after frequent flying revelations’, Guardian, 20 Nov. 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/20/un-environment-chief-erik-solheim-resigns-flying-revelations.

91

Interview with western diplomat, June 2023.

92

Haug, Mainstreaming South–South and triangular cooperation.

93

Interview with a UN official, Oct. 2021.

94

Guterres, ‘Secretary-General's remarks at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation’, 2019.

95

Interview with a member state representative, Feb. 2021.

96

United Nations Development Programme, ‘US statement: UNDP executive board internal documentation’, 2021 (not publicly available).

97

United Nations Development Programme, ‘UNDP executive board internal documentation’, 2020 (not publicly available).

98

United Nations Development Programme, ‘UNDP executive board internal documentation’.

99

United Nations Development Programme, ‘UNDP executive board internal documentation’.

100

United Nations Development Programme, ‘US statement’.

101

Executive Board of the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Population Fund and the United Nations Office for Project Services, ‘Country programme document for China (2021–2025)’, 17 July 2020, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3877246.

102

Baumann et al., China's expanding engagement, p. 22.

103

Interview with UN official, Nov. 2021; see Baumann et al., China's expanding engagement, p. 22.

104

According to interviewees, China would have liked to see a continuation of engagement but accepted the UNDP's decision.

105

United Nations Industrial Development Organization, ‘Programme for country partnership’, 2023, https://www.unido.org/programme-country-partnership.

106

See Baumann et al., China's expanding engagement, p. 18; UNIDO, ‘Programme for country partnership’.

107

Interview with a member state representative, Nov. 2021.

108

Interview with a UN official, June 2021.

109

For an example, see United Nations Industrial Development Organization, ‘Bridge for cities: driving innovation for urban resilience and recovery from COVID-19’, 31 Oct. 2021, https://www.bridgeforcities.org/bridge-for-cities-2021-driving-innovation-for-urban-resilience-and-recovery-from-covid-19; see also United Nations Industrial Development Organization, ‘Bridge for cities: Belt and Road Initiative: developing green economies for cities’, undated, https://www.unido.org/bridge-for-cities.

110

Interviews with UN officials, April and May 2021.

111

Interviews with UN officials, Feb. 2022.

112

Belt and Road Forum, ‘Chair's statement of the Third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation’, 18 Oct. 2023, http://www.beltandroadforum.org/english/n101/2023/1020/c127-1271.html.

113

Lynch, ‘China enlists U.N.’.

114

Lee, ‘It's not just the WHO’.

115

Interviewees reported no such instance.

116

Interviews with UN officials and member state representatives, March and April 2021; see also Chandran Nair, ‘Anti-China rhetoric is off the charts in Western media’, The Diplomat, 21 Feb. 2023, https://thediplomat.com/2023/02/anti-china-rhetoric-is-off-the-charts-in-western-media.

117

For countries that have signed BRI-related agreements, see Green Finance & Development Center, ‘Countries of the BRI’.

118

Jinghan Zeng, Slogan politics: understanding Chinese foreign policy concepts (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), p. 75.

119

For an example, see Yunbi, ‘Leaders hail Piraeus’.

120

Tallberg and Zürn, ‘The legitimacy and legitimation of international organizations’.

121

Oud and Drinhausen, ‘Decoding China dictionary’, p. 4.

122

Yaroslav Trofimov, Drew Hinshaw and Kate O'Keeffe, ‘How China is taking over international organizations, one vote at a time’, Wall Street Journal, 29 Sept. 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-china-is-taking-over-international-organizations-one-vote-at-a-time-11601397208.

123

Interview with a Chinese expert, March 2021.

124

Xi Jinping, ‘Speech at the general debate of the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly’, 22 Sept. 2021, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjb_663304/zzjg_663340/gjs_665170/gjsxw_665172/202109/t20210923_9580159.html.

125

See Ruby Osman, ‘Bye bye BRI? Why 3 new initiatives will shape the next 10 years of China's global outreach’, TIME, 1 Oct. 2023, https://time.com/6319264/china-belt-and-road-ten-years.

126

Zhou Taidong, ‘Key takeaways: day 1’, in Research and Information System for Developing Countries, Towards Indian G-20 presidency (Delhi: RIS, 2022), https://www.ris.org.in/sites/default/files/Publication/SSC_Delhi_Process%20VI%20Report.pdf, p. 27.

127

Baumann et al., China's expanding engagement.

128

Interview with a western diplomat, Jan 2022.

129

Junhua Li, ‘Closing remarks at high-level meeting on Global Development Initiatives cooperation outcomes GDI for SDGs: action and progress’, 19 Sept. 2023, https://www.un.org/en/desa-en/closing-remarks-hl-meeting-global-development-initiatives-cooperation-outcomes-gdi.

130

On Taiwan, see Jessica Drun and Bonnie Glaser, The distortion of UN Resolution 2758 to limit Taiwan's access to the United Nations (Washington DC: The German Marshall Fund of the United States, 2022), https://www.gmfus.org/sites/default/files/2022-03/Drun%26Glaser-distortion-un-resolution-2758-limit-taiwans-access.pdf.

131

Ruby Osman, ‘Bye bye BRI?’.

132

Xi, ‘Speech at the general debate of the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly’.

133

Tung Cheng-Chia and Alan H. Yang, ‘How China is remaking the UN in its own image’, The Diplomat, 9 April 2020, https://thediplomat.com/2020/04/how-china-is-remaking-the-un-in-its-own-image.

134

United Nations, ‘Global gateway approach can help achieve 2030 agenda, deputy secretary-general says, declaring “the time for bold and audacious action has arrived”’, press release, DSG/SM/1878, 25 Oct. 2023, https://press.un.org/en/2023/dsgsm1878.doc.htm.

135

Government of India, Ministry of Culture, ‘Project Mausam’, 2024, https://indiaculture.gov.in/project-mausam; see also Rani Singh and Tim Winter, ‘From Hinduism to Hindutva: civilizational internationalism and UNESCO’, International Affairs 99: 2, 2023, pp. 515–30, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiac320.

136

Lenz and Söderbaum, ‘The origins of legitimation strategies’, p. 914–20.

Author notes

This article has benefited from discussions at the 2021 European Consortium for Political Research workshop on ‘The legitimation of international organizations in disruptive times’, the 2023 annual conference of the European International Studies Association, the 2023 annual meeting of the thematic group on international organizations of the German Political Science Association, and meetings of the Tulpenfeld Five. I am grateful to five anonymous reviewers and Andrew Dorman for constructive comments on earlier versions of this article; to Lara Hammersen, Jonas Vellguth and Nico Fricke for their research assistance; and to my respondents for sharing insights into the evolving contours of UN–BRI relations. I would also like to thank Max-Otto Baumann, Julian Bergmann, Sarah von Billerbeck, Han Cheng, Ben Christian, Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, Daniel Esser, Rosemary Foot, Jacqueline Götze, Tim Heinkelmann-Wild, Monika Heupel, Gisela Hirschmann, Heiner Janus, Christian Kreuder-Sonnen, Tobias Lenz, Mao Ruipeng, Marina Rudyak, Matthew Stephen, Dorothea Wehrmann and Silke Weinlich for feedback and encouragement. The research that this article builds on was partly funded by the United Kingdom's Economic and Social Research Council and Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.