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

Research Project
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01.01.2020
 - 31.12.2020

Contemporary infrastructure projects often look alike, produced as they are by planning agencies that operate across the world in public-private partnerships. This global production of infrastructure-ranging from oil pipelines and plants to power grids 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. Much analysis of contemporary infrastructure investment ignores the colonial legacies of infrastructure planning. Infrastructures, imagined as generic artefacts of modernity and projects of technical improvement, are only seemingly apolitical and frequently reproduce global inequalities. The reliance of postcolonial states on global financial institutions and experts for their infrastructural development implies unequal power relations, but developmentalist studies tend to naturalize these. 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. Based on three cases of energy infrastructure projects in East Africa, North Africa and Latin America, this research analyzes the contested power dynamics triggered by attempts at making infrastructure global. With EUCOR seed money, the partners will establish a cross-border research platform and develop a proposal for DFG/SNF or ERC funding.

Funding

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

Weitere ausländische Förderagenturen (GrantsTool), 01.2020-12.2020 (12)
PI : Cupers, Kenny R..

Members (2)

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Kenny R. Cupers

Principal Investigator
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Maren Larsen

Project Member