Large Scale Investments in Infrastructure: Competing Policy regimes to Control Connections

Abstract

This paper proposes to analyse implications of large-scale investments in physical infrastructure for social and environmental justice. While case studies on the global land rush and climate change have advanced our understanding of how large-scale investments in land, forests and water affect natural resources and social relationships especially in the global South, physical infrastructure – dams, railways, highways, etc. – which often accompanies the land rush has received little attention as a proper unit of study. We argue that in addition to the physical impacts that the infrastructure creates, such as environmental destruction or human displacement, we should pay attention to the concrete ‘infrastructure process’ by which the planning, implementation, management and uses of the infrastructure mobilises various, public, private, global, national and local, actors and often tacitly creates multiple and connected spaces of deliberations. Drawing on three infrastructure projects coinvested by the Dutch international cooperation in Mozambique and Vietnam, we point out that the infrastructure as a ‘public work’ seldom benefits marginalised communities, but the location of responsibility for ensuring distributional equity is blurred in the connected spaces. Moreover, procedural equity for the excluded communities to fully participate in demanding the fair benefitsharing is not clearly pursued, as the infrastructure is often incrementally built and locally embedded, changing the nature and extent of the connections and often recreating disconnections. We find that the current justice framework fails to effectively identify responsibilities to ensure the equities in large-scale infrastructure projects, as people experience, embed and attempt to govern the infrastructure process themselves in relation to the connectivity. We especially need to consider that the donor community, backed by global governance of international development, exercises its power to promote distributional and procedural equities.