Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the recent turn towards a renewed focus on infrastructure and urban development assistance among major donors (and particularly the UK), situated against the politics of increased economic nationalism and the merging of development, diplomacy and trade agendas.

Paper long abstract:

The past decade has seen repeated upheaval in the development sector, from the aftershocks of the financial crisis and right-wing populist campaigns against aid to the global trauma of COVID-19. In the UK, these events have culminated in the slashing of aid and the merging of DFID and the Foreign Office. Yet alongside this tumultuous decade in the aid sector, the emergence of the SDGs and UN-HABITAT’s ‘New Urban Agenda’ promised a new dawn for inclusive and sustainable development, built from the bottom up.

Ticking away in the background of this crisis decade has been the growing obsession with the ‘infrastructure gap’. The rediscovery of infrastructure, and indeed of cities – both central objects of aid in the early development decades that fell from grace with the neoliberal turn – intrinsically has much to recommend it. However, when set against the financial sector’s post-crisis quest for new asset horizons, the politics of Britain’s post-Brexit ‘global role’, and signs of increased alignment between development, diplomacy and trade, the raft of recent programmes on cities and infrastructure risk becoming focused on exporting British infrastructure (and infrastructure expertise) abroad. While infrastructure and urban assistance in the early development period were associated with a relatively coherent industrialization agenda, in today’s context of financialization, multipolar competition and environmental crisis these agendas are subject to competing logics. This paper explores how negative discourses concerning gaps and absences are substituting for a positive agenda, rendering the real ‘new urban agenda’ vulnerable to the whims of politics in donor countries.