Abstract: The governance of infrastructure projects presents many issues, some of which legal scholars are well placed to address but others that go beyond legal scholarship and expertise. This article highlights a few of the ‘mixed’ issues that require legal scholars to read new fields, especially studies of infrastructure planning and use in the global South. What has been called ‘fragment urbanism’ may be a better paradigm going forward, in the global North as well as South, to replace the much-vaunted but now largely defunded ‘modern infrastructure ideal’ of integrated or at least coordinated major networks.

This chapter uses the relationship(s) between data and mobility through physical spaces to explore why the characterization of data as infrastructure might matter for law- and policy-makers. As sets of structured data flows layered over other infrastructures have multiplied and intersected with practices of data extraction and appropriation, some of those data flows—in particular, data flows maintained by entities with the resources to manipulate them in real time and at scale—have come to function as infrastructures in their own right, destabilizing existing settlements regarding the movement of people and goods. Data infrastructures (are designed to) scale both vertically and laterally; they are nimble, flexible, and adaptable to new uses. The infrastructure lens helps to explain some of the challenges that regulatory efforts have faced and suggests some important questions about newer, platform-specific regulatory models that are now beginning to emerge.

Henry Adams highlights a historic shift to carbon culture and serves as the historiographic hinge of the book. This chapter focuses on Adams’s historiography. Provoked by the release of “mechanical energies” that transformed the world from his birth in 1838 to 1907 when he circulated a manuscript of The Education of Henry Adams, he claimed that “the historian’s business was to follow the track of energy.“ This chapter sketches Adams’s journey through Pittsburgh to the World’s Fair in 1904 to show the impact of new energy on Adams himself and on his own historical writing. His key terms are “energy” and “economy.” The chapter draws upon his “Dynamic Theory” and his account of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 to advance a reading of human history in terms of energy crises and to question the opposition between humanistic and scientific knowledge.

This chapter follows America’s foremost public intellectual to the smoky city in 1851, starting with a journey across the Alleghenies before the Pennsylvania Railroad was completed. There, to the Young Men’s Mercantile Library Association, Emerson lectured on “Economy” and “Power.” Inspired by Pittsburgh, Emerson fashioned practical ideas for how to live in a carbon-fueled culture. Young people, he argued, should embrace life’s dialectical nature: “We can only obey our own polarity.” Coal sparked his imagination. Emerson mythologized engineers as Promethean demigods. The lectures, later collected in The Conduct of Life, set the terms for the fossil-fuel culture materializing on the banks of the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers. This chapter illustrates the emergence of that culture under the conditions of a new energy regime in the vision of a capitalistic philosopher and self-described poet.

Chapter 5 examines the creation and evolution of Mexico’s Seguro Popular, a health reform implemented in 2003 to expand insurance coverage for the uninsured. Despite the existence of institutionalized political parties, the legislation was driven mainly by technocrats rather than by programmatic party commitment. The National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, PAN), in power at the time, endorsed the reform but did not participate in shaping its content because it did not align with its core values. The Health Secretary and the Seguro Popular technocratic team introduced the initiative, lobbied for support, and were in charge of key decisions. The reform was passed in Congress, largely because it promised increased resources to state governments, rather than due to ideological consensus. Its implementation met with significant challenges. Coverage increased, but funding and infrastructure lagged, limiting access to services. Political parties failed to ensure sustainable funding and robust oversight. The reform ultimately struggled with insufficient programmatic commitment from PAN, PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional; Institutional Revolutionary Party), and PRD (Partido de la Revolución Democrática; Party of the Democratic Revolution), which undermined the quality of the legislation and its long-term success. Seguro Popular was replaced in 2020, and its end reflected both partisan competition and the original lack of cross-party support and detailed policy design.

This chapter shows that because of its geography Southeast Asian countries needed to build relatively little infrastructure and that infrastructure was concentrated in the cities and for staple commodities.

Chapter 7 explores Egypt, a consolidated autocracy. Historically colonized by the French and British, Egypt also received substantial financial support from the United States. Egypt was initially less involved with Europe’s external migration approach throughout the 1990s and 2000s in comparison to neighboring countries, but in 2017 the EU and Egypt signed an agreement under the EUTF worth €60 million. The funding was divided among seven projects, ranging from institutional capacity building to job generation and entrepreneurship. The majority of EUTF funding went toward infrastructure improvement in line with the current President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s domestic priorities. In this way, migration management aid reinforced Egypt’s authoritarian rule through substitution (pathway II) and by channeling funding through patronage networks (pathway III). The EUTF’s predominant spending on local infrastructure projects tied beneficiaries to government networks, and also allowed the government to redirect its funding toward mega infrastructure projects built through military contracts, thereby further capacitating the regime’s repressive apparatus.

Chapter 6 shifts from procurement to the spatial allocation of local public goods, examining how partisan considerations shape the placement of infrastructure in communities. It begins by outlining the formal planning processes, in which bureaucrats are expected to design allocations based on community needs. However, interviews and prior research reveal frequent deviations from these plans, often driven by political pressure. Using data from Ghana’s Central Region, the chapter shows a strong correlation between the ruling party’s prior vote share and the number of projects a community receives. At the same time, the analysis highlights the role of need: poorer communities are more likely to secure projects than wealthier ones. These patterns suggest a dual influence – politicians seek to reward co-partisan communities, while bureaucrats attempt to prioritize developmental considerations. To probe this further, the chapter employs a survey experiment across eighty local governments. Results confirm that bureaucrats perceive both partisanship and need as influential, but partisan alignment often outweighs need in determining outcomes. The evidence thus reveals a tug-of-war between politicians and bureaucrats, with distributive outcomes shaped by the balance of partisan incentives and bureaucratic resistance. This politicization of allocation ultimately undermines equitable and efficient public service delivery.

Cities concentrate opportunity and inequality. This chapter shows how rapid urbanization has generated both prosperity and exclusion. It analyses the governance challenges of megacities, including infrastructure gaps, housing crises, and fragmented authority. It advocates for institutional reforms to promote inclusive urban development, where growth does not mean gated prosperity for the few but opportunity for the many.

This chapter explores developments after standards for pre-project consultation were raised in 2013. The six cases examined in this chapter, funded by multilateral and national development banks operating in the Asia Pacific region after heightened community engagement policies, were introduced underscore a number of key insights. The post-2013 cases broadly demonstrate a number of key improvements including greater rigour in consultation and diligence mechanisms, heightened precision in identifying issues of community concern, higher pre-project diligence and screening standards, ongoing environmental and technical monitoring, the presence of locally trained mediators, skill development for consultation participants, and a longer-term view of community welfare and responsive grievance remedies. Shortcomings persisted in some cases, including instances of duress, lack of information disclosure, fraud, limited access to consultation mechanisms and environmental harm leading to project cessation in two cases when the adverse social impacts were seen to outweigh potential benefits. On the whole, corresponding with more rigorous community consultation and diligence standards, during this phase, the number of stalled/cancelled and litigated case declined by 33%, the percentages of cases brought to court declined by 16%, and the number of cases pursuing party agreement through mediation or negotiation increased by 50% compared with ad-hoc discretionary consultation practices prior to 2013.

This chapter presents a series of six investor–community case studies in the Asia Pacific region during the pre-2013 period, during which pre-project community engagement and accountability on the part of infrastructure investment banks were relatively less stringent, in order to understand the impact of relatively relaxed community engagement standards on subsequent grievance claims. This set of six cases will be compared with a set of six cases presented in Chapter 6 after heightened diligence standards were introduced after 2013. The cases reviewed in this chapter were either sole financed projects by the World Bank/International Finance Corporation or collaborative projects with the Asian Development Bank and European Investment Bank in the Asia Pacific region. The sectors include investment in transport, the extractive industry and special economic zone development. The key finding of this chapter is that during this pre-2013 discretionary community consultation phase, most cases resulted in either full or partial project cancellation, delay, suspension, compensation for harms or transfer to local courts for resolution. A small portion were dismissed due to insufficient information. In total, of the six cases examined, four were cancelled or stalled, one proceeded to court litigation and one was closed. The cases highlight the risks of insufficient attention to community consultation.

This chapter explores the rise of US imperial militarism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the settler colonial American West and overseas colonies in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific. Beyond sketching a general account of this period, the chapter argues that US military colonization was both a set of distinct encounters and a larger project connected by shared repertoires of violence; transfers of expert knowledge; and ideologies of racialized dominance. It also understands US imperial militarism in infrastructural terms. Military actors and organizations served not only as the sharp edge of colonization, but also initial – and sometimes primary – agents of colonial state-building. Longer term, American imperialism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era created the conditions of possibility, both ideologically and materially, for global elaborations of US empire that persist today.

Work on racial capitalism and the wholesale financialization of the planetary commons has long sought to clarify the pathological nature of such acts of imperial expansion as land enclosure, expropriation, and the reification of life into the commodity form; so too, the degree to which these acts of state terror, which have insured the continued production of new commodity frontiers in the service of resource extraction, are bolstered by developmentalist narratives that sublimate genocidal campaigns of dispossession in service to the enabling myth of limitless plenitude on a finite planet. Antagonizing such fictions, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man and Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus bring to life the otherwise “brute matter” of Chamoiseau’s plantation and Viramontes’ poisoned orchards. As argued in this chapter, both novels also demonstrate the affordances of disruptive temporal forms for interrupting the smooth contours of commodity chains in which enslaved persons are rendered – politically and materially speaking – as themselves commodities. Slave Old Man and Under the Feet of Jesus are anti-extractivist works that center critiques of racial and fossil capital, while also antagonizing the forward march of global capitalist production, which has long relied on the invisibility and disposability of the planetary poor.