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Record W4413852269 · doi:10.1080/23311886.2025.2551872

Contesting the imagined futures of infrastructure projects in Uganda

2025· article· en· W4413852269 on OpenAlex
Joel Odota

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueCogent Social Sciences · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicInternational Development and Aid
Canadian institutionsUniversité de Montréal
FundersUnited States Institute of Peace
KeywordsFutures contractBusinessPublic administrationPolitical scienceEconomic growthSociologyFinanceEconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This paper critically examines the impacts of Chinese-backed infrastructure projects in Uganda, focusing on the tensions and conflicts surrounding their development. It highlights how the anticipated benefits of these projects are often contested and met with collective resistance. Drawing on interdisciplinary frameworks of state capacity and contentious politics, we analyze two key examples of Chinese-backed infrastructure projects in Uganda: the Kampala-Entebbe Expressway (KEE) and the Entebbe International Airport Expansion Project. Our central argument is that Uganda’s weak state capacity facilitates poorly planned and executed projects, leading to their failure to meet expectations. Discontent arises from the gap between the promised futures of these infrastructure projects and the disappointing realities they have produced. This disconnect can be attributed to systemic issues stemming from the state’s inability to effectively govern and manage the projects. The consequences of Uganda’s weak state capacity include widespread corruption, a lack of transparency and accountability, disregard for human rights, inadequate risk assessment, and poor adherence to regulations. Furthermore, limited community engagement and the failure to address local concerns have compounded the socio-political challenges facing the country. These issues are reflected in the growing public disillusionment, as evidenced by the recurring protests against the government.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.561
Threshold uncertainty score0.728

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.030
GPT teacher head0.365
Teacher spread0.334 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it