8: From ‘infrastructure as lock-in’ to ‘infrastructure as enabler’ for better worlds (Beau Warbroek, Tom Coenen, Sean Vrielink, Angie Ruiz Robles, Joanne Vinke-de Kruijf, Baran Ulak)
Infrastructure can be understood as a socio-technical system that shapes “constructs that are woven into human lives, settlements and societies” (Carroli, 2018, p. 82). This emphasizes infrastructure’s role as an enabling system as it serves society in performing its functions (Markard, 2011). To address the many changes towards ‘better worlds’, infrastructure runs the risk of acting as a lock-in and impeding societal changes (Markard & Hofman, 2016). Contrarily, by rethinking infrastructure, it could also be instrumental in enabling societal transitions. For example, infrastructure is critical in facilitating various transitions such as the energy transition, climate adaptation, transitions in road transport, data and digitalization, and circularity. In this track, we aim to explore the ambivalent role of infrastructure in transitions and aim for a broad discussion of the role of infrastructure in ‘better worlds’.
Infrastructure as lock-in: the archaic values and practices vested in infrastructure governance and practice may hinder fundamental and systemic transitions towards better worlds. While the long-term character of infrastructure could enable sustainable pathways, present day infrastructure life cycles are guided by current needs and values, which are projected over the course of 50-100 years. As such, current values that may be incompatible with sustainable futures are prolonged in the long term as they are embedded in infrastructure. This temporal mismatch could potentially lead to new, unsustainable lock-ins. An example is the roll-out of charging points for personal electrical vehicles, which reinforces and locks in the existing normative value of personal car ownership. Destabilization and discontinuation of undesired infrastructure system aspect is difficult because of the rigidity, interdependencies, and long-term character of infrastructure.
Infrastructure as enabler: Contrarily, current infrastructure supports the proliferation of sustainable technologies and innovations. Up until now, infrastructure has been predominantly reactive and capacity-providing. However, infrastructure has the potential to steer transitions towards pathways leading to a better world. In this track, we explore how other approaches to governance of infrastructure could contribute to transitions towards better worlds. Questions that we address in the track are:
- What is the impact of changing values and value plurality in infrastructure governance?
- How can the adaptability of infrastructure be enhanced to better accommodate changing societal needs and values?
- What infrastructure governance approaches could put infrastructure in an enabling role?
- How can infrastructure contribute to a resilient society in the face of various challenges, including climate change and economic shifts?
- How can the directionality of change in infrastructure be determined, steered, and stimulated?
We will incorporate three sessions in this track: two sessions are linked to a call for papers in which we invite scholarly work, which could be conference papers, discussion papers, or working papers. We welcome both conceptual/theoretical and practice-oriented contributions. The third session is a workshop around the local initiative INTRANT in which the Twente region explores future transitions in infrastructure together with a wide range of practitioners. This session is aimed at interaction between academics and practitioners in governing transitions in the infrastructure domain.
Keywords: infrastructure, governance, lock-in, values, transitions