Year: 2025-2026
Research Team Type: Student-led
Team lead: Aaditee Kudrimoti, PhD student, Department of City & Regional Planning
The Asian Infrastructures and Expert Networks team investigates how expert networks have historically contributed to the successful implementation of industrial policy and large-scale infrastructure development in East and Southeast Asia. While much of the existing literature attributes these developmental successes to state-capitalism and highly-centralized governance, this team argues that such explanations risk overlooking the institutional and technocratic arrangements that enabled policy implementation on the ground. Through a focus on the Chinese electricity sector, they examine how engineers, economists, planners, and policymakers collectively translated national sectoral goals into coordinated infrastructural outcomes. Drawing from disciplines including history, economics, planning, and political ecology, they examine how configurations of state, expertise, and labor enabled the expansion of critical infrastructure and supported the rise of East and Southeast Asian countries in the global economy.
They will conduct a case study on China’s electricity system, from the Reform and Opening period to present-day efforts in decarbonization and electricity market liberalization. They will hold monthly expert roundtables with practitioners from institutions like LBNL, ERG, and Berkeley’s California-China Climate Institute. These interviews will be recorded, coded using MAXQDA, and analyzed collaboratively by the student team. Their goal is to develop alternative theoretical frameworks that move beyond state-capitalist and regime-type explanations and better capture the role of expert networks in sectoral planning. This project offers timely insights for liberal democracies currently embracing industrial policy, by drawing lessons from Asia’s developmental states on how to cultivate and deploy expertise to meet strategic infrastructure goals.