Green BRI in South Asia: Rhetoric Versus Reality in the Energy Transition

China introduced the world’s most ambitious infrastructure financing project in 2013 and named it the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This program has undergone a profound rhetorical transformation in recent years. Initially, it was associated with coal power plants, fossil-fuel pipelines, and carbon-intensive infrastructure but in September 2021 at the United Nations General Assembly Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to stop financing new coal-powered projects overseas. Thus, the Chinese narrative now presents the BRI as the Green Silk Road and is aligned with the Paris Agreement of 2015. This article tries to critically nfavou the Green BRI narrative in South Asia under rigorous empirical merit. The reason for choosing specifically the South Asian region is due to the Chinese heavy investment in it than any other region under BRI. The article assesses whether the Green BRI constitutes a genuine structural shift in China’s abroad energy engagement or whether it is just a popular case of strategic greenwashing. For this, various current data is studied, such as of the Green Finance & Development Centre’s BRI Investment Reports (2023-2025), Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center, AidData, the International Energy Agency (IEA), and country-specific primary sources from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. The article concludes by proposing a ‘Conditional Green Transition’ framework, arguing that the Green BRI’s transformative potential can only be realized through binding multilateral green standards for BRI financing, accelerated retirement of legacy coal assets, just transition financing for affected communities, and the cultivation of South Asian state capacity to negotiate and enforce green conditionality in BRI agreements.

Keywords:
Green BRI, South Asia, Renewable Energy, Climate Change, Greenwashing, Coal Pledge.