Competing for Africa’s markets: The EU, US, China, and the of African agency in the politics of development finance

This article examines African agency in the context of a multipolar and financialised world order. While debates on ‘African(s) agency’ have moved beyond dependency and neo-colonial paradigms, its meaning, scope, and analytical utility the political economy of financialisation –the growing reliance on private finance and market-based development– remains underexplored. What counts as agency, at what level it operates, and how it can be empirically traced in global political economy remain open questions. The article develops a relational framework for understanding African agency not as autonomy from structural power but as ‘situated negotiation’ within these structural constraints. It conceptualises agency as a spectrum of strategies –ranging from poly-alignment and selective adaptation to institutional and ideational creation– through which African actors navigate overlapping spheres of influence shaped by the United States, the European Union, and China, each promoting distinct models of financial governance and economic development. By linking literatures in political economy, development studies, international relations, African political thought and decolonial theory, the article reconceptualises African agency as both constrained and constitutive: a dynamic force shaping the evolving architecture of global development finance. Using financial market-building as a case study, an emblematic site where multiple powers promote distinct models of development finance, the paper examines how African institutions engage with and reshape these competing major-power-agendas. The article contributes to theorising African agency, and offers methodological pathways for analysing power and resistance. This case reveals how African institutions navigate overlapping conditionalities and shape, rather than merely receive, global financial reforms. Building on the notion of the Wall Street Consensus, the article concludes that the current emphasis on “developing domestic capital markets” constitutes a new form of conditionality, embedded in the infrastructures and logics of finance itself. In sum, the article contributes to (1) theorising African agency as relational and constitutive, (2) identifying financial market-building as a new form of conditionality that constrains developmental autonomy, (3) mapping how distinct US, EU, and Chinese development models shape and limit African agency in a multipolar world, and (4) offering methodological tools to empirically trace agency within global political economy.