Making Infrastructure Global? Design and Governance of Infrastructural Expansion in the Global South

Contemporary infrastructure projects often look alike, produced as they are by corporate planning and consultancy agencies that operate across the world in public-private partnerships. This global production of infrastructure—ranging from pipelines and plants to highways and dams—is rapidly transforming the Global South and its relationship with the rest of the world, yet a deeper understanding of its design and governance is lacking. The Northern focus of infrastructure studies and concomitant perception that the Global South lacks planning has considerably constrained our understanding of the Global South’s infrastructural transformation. Even though infrastructural connections between North and South have historically been undergirded by colonialism, the colonial legacies of infrastructure planning are ignored in much analysis of contemporary infrastructure investment. Yet such seemingly apolitical projects of technical improvement are frequently criticized for reproducing global inequalities, both in access and in planning. The reliance of postcolonial states on global financial institutions and experts for their infrastructural development implies unequal power relations, but these tend to be naturalized in developmentalist studies. This interdisciplinary project combines approaches from urban studies and political science to explore the role of global planning agencies and colonial legacies in transnational infrastructural expansion in the Global South. Overcoming the idea of infrastructures as generic artefacts of modernity, this interdisciplinary project seeks to explore the context-dependent, deeply contested power dynamics triggered by attempts at making infrastructures global. The study combines regional expertise in studying three cases of expansion plans for energy infrastructure from Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, facilitating interdisciplinary research and durable ties between the Urban Studies Department in Basel, the Political Science Department in Freiburg, and the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) Freiburg, as an external partner.