Infrastructure governance for the Anthropocene

Mikhail V Chester,Tischa A Muñoz-Erickson,Thaddeus Miller

doi:10.1525/elementa.2020.078

Abstract

Transitioning infrastructure governance for accelerating, increasingly uncertain, and increasingly complex environments is paramount for ensuring that critical and basic services are met during times of stability and instability. Yet the bureaucratic structures that dominate infrastructure organizations and their capacity to respond to increasing complexity remain poorly understood. To change infrastructure governance, it is critical to understand current conditions, the barriers to change, and the strategies needed to shift priorities and leadership strategy. The emergence of modern infrastructure bureaucratic and organizational structure is first explored. The need to rethink infrastructure as knowledge enterprises capable of making sense of changing conditions, and not simply as basic service providers, is discussed. Next, transformation of infrastructure governance is presented as both a challenge of organizational change as identity and power and leadership capacity to shift between stable and unstable conditions. Infrastructure bureaucracies should create capabilities to shift between periods of stability and instability, emphasizing flexibility where ad hoc teams are given power to make sense of changing conditions and steer the organization appropriately. Additionally, several critical factors must be addressed within organizational power structures, identities, and processes to facilitate change. Allowing infrastructure governance to persist in its current form is likely increasingly problematic for the future and may result in an increasing inability to maintain relevance.

Highlights

Physical infrastructure systems today and the institutions that manage them are facing growing challenges that raise serious questions about their viability in the Anthropocene
They have been remarkably successful at delivering reliable and affordable critical services—such as power, water, and transportation— and in doing so driving growth and economic stability and improving well-being. These systems may be victims of their own success. They have become so mundane that they appear taken for granted in the developed world and often viewed as the engineer’s domain (La Porte, 1996; Coutard, 2002): We might expect that the delivery of reliable and affordable critical services will continue without question, despite operating environments that are
An opening up of how we manage infrastructure is needed that considers both stable and unstable conditions, and an examination of why we allow organizations to focus on performance goals that largely reflect those of the last century, that is, the continued and uninterrupted delivery of services using largely centralized and rigid systems, with what appears to be limited capability of adapting to the accelerating challenges and complexity of the Anthropocene

Summary

Infrastructure governance for the Anthropocene

Transitioning infrastructure governance for accelerating, increasingly uncertain, and increasingly complex environments is paramount for ensuring that critical and basic services are met during times of stability and instability. The bureaucratic structures that dominate infrastructure organizations and their capacity to respond to increasing complexity remain poorly understood.To change infrastructure governance, it is critical to understand current conditions, the barriers to change, and the strategies needed to shift priorities and leadership strategy. Transformation of infrastructure governance is presented as both a challenge of organizational change as identity and power and leadership capacity to shift between stable and unstable conditions. Infrastructure bureaucracies should create capabilities to shift between periods of stability and instability, emphasizing flexibility where ad hoc teams are given power to make sense of changing conditions and steer the organization appropriately. Allowing infrastructure governance to persist in its current form is likely increasingly problematic for the future and may result in an increasing inability to maintain relevance

Introduction

Conclusion