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Paper short abstract:

Infrastructure finance and assurance (“infraspace”) is governed by its own logics and priorities. These do not reflect the needs and values of water and sanitation customers. This paper uses two examples (project finance procedures and the discourse of resilience) to explore this division.

Paper long abstract:

The provision of essential services such as water provision and sanitation in the UK reflects the competing power and logics of a number of actors. Customers have expectations and demands; financial actors and investors have their own logics and priorities; water companies have shareholders, financial backers, targets and forecasts to satisfy; and civil servants and regulators on the side of Government are governed by the bureaucratic process of infrastructure provision, assurance and regulation. Building on several years of ethnographic work on interdisciplinary projects, working with anthropologists and political economists in “infraspace” (Heslop), this paper takes two of the nodes in the System of Provision of water and sanitation as exemplars of a system that has disenfranchised water customers in favour of financial logics and the demands of the market. Firstly, the Thames Tideway Tunnel (London’s over-engineered “super sewer”) will be examined as a example of the ways in which expensive water mega-projects are built in order to satisfy the demands of investors for infrastructure projects as an asset class. It will be shown how this is detrimental for the communities who use the services, as it ties them into a long-term exploitative relationship with the providers of project finance. Secondly, the emergent logic of “resilience” in infrastructure assurance circles will be examined as an example of the ways in which consumers end up, through an apparently emancipatory language of consumer rights and priorities, paradoxically having to accept poorer and less reliable water and sanitation services.