The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) highlights the role of large infrastructures in promoting socioeconomic progress. Environmental and social planning will play a pivotal role to ensure that the BRI is tuned with the protection of nature and societal needs. This paper appraises environmental and social safeguards employed by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), one of BRI’s key actors. Results show that their rationale, scope, and function are aligned with international practice. Their efficacy however may be jeopardized by the limited capacity of the Bank to oversee the screening and assessment of impacts. More importantly, AIIB’s safeguards endorse an obsolete conceptualization of sustainability, centred on the mitigation of impacts, rather than on the transformation of socioeconomic development patterns.

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