A central aim of this probing book is to provide a redress to the view put forward by International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and others that have touted Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) as the best way to build infrastructure in developing countries. PPPs, arrangements that involve business in the provision of public services, are not intrinsically flawed, but their proponents invariably recommend their implementation, and are committed to seeing infrastructure investment in econometric and technical terms exclusively and remain blinkered to politics. IFI “best practices” are therefore not merely beyond the reach of many developing countries, but cannot provide an explanation of the complexities present in conditions of democratic “transition” and “consolidation.” On the other hand, approaches such as New Institutional Economics (NIE) take account of politics, but focus on formal institutions. Another of the book’s aims is therefore to “complement” (p. 12) NIE by widening the scope of examination to informal institutions in three areas: state-business relations and rent-seeking; the regulation-making of ministries (as opposed to the law-making of parliament); and struggles over land. This approach, which Davidson calls a “political sociology of infrastructure investment,” follows and substantially enriches a vein of literature on informal institutions that has emerged in the last decade or so.

At the center of Davidson’s account are toll-roads in Indonesia. The uneven success of Indonesian government attempts to attract international and domestic private capital to toll-roads cannot be understood, it is argued, apart from the historical precedent of the authoritarian rule under Soeharto’s New Order regime, then the transition to democracy in the late 1990s. Thus, the early chapters detail patterns of historical rent-seeking, principally by Soeharto’s children, but also abiding patterns of rule by presidential decree and problems of land tenure in urban and peri-urban areas of the north coast of Java, the site of a long-planned, still incomplete Trans-Java expressway.

The book’s real contribution comes in its later chapters (3–6), however, as it connects a failure to attract investment to a series of paradoxes of democratic transition by foregrounding more recent difficulties in completing toll-road projects since 2005. Superficially, at the heart of this failure is that, in Indonesia, roads can be built more quickly than land can be acquired. In the period since democratic transition beginning in 1998, foreign investors have shied away from perceived difficulties of acquiring security of tenure on land used for toll-roads. Yet their concerns were less prominent under authoritarian rule when legislation was less clear, land was acquired forcibly, and there were fewer practical possibilities for legal redress.

The deeper explanation for why toll roads have not been completed emerges when Davidson explores and highlights the paradoxes of a constantly changing political order. For example, Indonesia’s first directly-elected president, Susilo Bambang Yudhohyono, resorted to a decree in 2005 to compulsorily acquire land that used his authoritarian predecessor’s as a template. A victim of his own ambition, President Yudhoyono could not make the decree workable against locally-controlled land acquisition committees, nor rely on a party machine to gain the compliance of local authorities, since his own (new) party commanded virtually no meaningful support at the local level. Chapter four details how, unable to implement the decree and under pressure, Yudhoyono’s administration ultimately drafted a land law that would empower the judiciary to override local objections.

The overall impression is that Yudhoyono and central government officials in general have run roughshod over the spirit and letter of sweeping decentralisation laws, a supposed hallmark of democratic reform. To put it more simply, they have repeated patterns of authoritarian governance. Yet Davidson does not entirely accept the arguments of scholars that have made the case for a reformulated, enduring structural power of authoritarian rule. The legacy is still present, but fundamentally a new form of politics has emerged characterized by messy deliberation rather than powerful state versus “little people” relations (p. 7). Thus, concessionaires include New Order-era rent-seekers such Aburizal Bakrie and Yusuf Kalla, but also many others. The book therefore problematizes the democratic political environment while also drawing proper attention to authoritarian legacies.

In fact, in explaining investment “failure,” many of the issues that are raised relate not to roads but to land, which, as the book convincingly demonstrates, carries with it a long history of legal complications in Indonesia, and affects every Indonesian citizen. On the other hand, toll-roads are confined mainly to Java, and mainly to Jakarta within Java. It is argued that toll-roads have been partly brought to national prominence by the frustrations of lawmakers themselves who must navigate them on a daily basis (p. 158). An arguably more convincing demonstration of how toll roads are relevant to more people is put forward in Chapter six, which details cases of land acquisition at the local level. The chapter vividly captures the attenuated property rights of a farmers’ community in the face of a land purchase, and contrasts this with a middle-class community in the same province that is better able to put across their case through formal channels and connections. To the extent that it illustrates the arguments of Chapters 3–5 especially, it is a very effective way to end the book.

The book unifies its three areas of focus in a synthesis most attractive to scholars of political economy and development studies. Scholars of comparative politics will also enjoy the book’s contextualisation of Indonesia with other examples from China, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, though a sustained comparison is not one of the study’s main objectives. And as noted earlier, the book takes a distinctive analytical approach while working within a substantial literature on informal institutions, particularly in developing countries. On the other hand, in common with Davidson’s approach, sociologists who focus on infrastructure also often reject a purely “technical” view of their subject but focus instead on analysing their political, technical, and other aspects together. Davidson’s book does not adopt the same perspective, but sociologists and anthropologists will nonetheless benefit from reading the book as a broad overview of infrastructure in Indonesia and its local case studies especially.

This study shines a light beyond the narrow confines of infrastructure’s efficacy in stimulating growth or meeting standards, raising as it does abiding questions of land tenure, central and local authority, and state-business relations. It could not have been published at a more fitting moment as the planning and execution of such projects is still accelerating across the world. Contrary to the assumption that such processes call for a uniform set of tools to analyse their workings, more work on informal institutions of this kind are necessary. It should, moreover, be required reading for upper-level politics and social science undergraduates and post-graduates who study democratic transitions in all their multifarious complexity, and for professionals from business and international institutions concerned with infrastructure projects across the world.