Paper short abstract:

The infrastructure finance community in the UK have a particular understanding of risk and, through their influencing of public bodies, this translates into the creation of new mega infrastructure and new revenue streams through which financial actors can directly gain access to service users.

Paper long abstract:

The financing mechanisms behind infrastructure - not just whether infrastructure is privately or publicly funded, but where finance is raised for projects - is an important and oft neglected factor that determines the nature and quality of service provision and effects the lives of those who are daily dependent on those services. The social world of global infrastructure finance is greatly influenced by "the immaterial infrastructures such as... social relationships" that this panel seeks to interrogate. In an interdisciplinary project drawing together myself, an anthropologist, and two economists, we have sought to ask how the understandings of particular financial actors lead to particular infrastructures becoming financed and built and what the effects of this may be for the infrastructure's users. Through interviews and observations with actors involved in project finance in the UK, we found that the particular risk-bound understandings that dominate the financial world has led to projects being created whereby public bodies take the bulk of risk, allowing private actors to take on projects that will clearly provide them with regular and stable revenues; a key example being the Thames Tideway super sewer. There has also been a growth in large high-capital projects at the expense of small builds and regular maintenance, again due to the particular demands of the finance community. This privileging of large, often over-engineered, infrastructure is both changing our material world and opening up UK citizens as a revenue stream for global financial actors in a way that they have not been before.