Infrastructure investments for resilience: Opportunities, barriers, and a future research agenda from the Orange-Senqu River Basin

Abstract

Decision makers are under pressure to make strategic water infrastructure investments under climatic uncertainty. While governments are responding with investments in climate resilient infrastructure, the increasingly complex and unpredictable dynamics of the Anthropocene demand attention to the broader paradigm of resilience, which asks decision makers to situate investments in the dynamics of complex social-ecological systems. Doing so requires more explicit consideration of irreducible uncertainties beyond climate change and infrastructure functions and interdependencies beyond direct water supply. However, the path dependence of prevailing predict-and-control approaches limits transitions to resilience, and the established practices of different actors enable or constrain this transition in different ways. At the time of research, a large-scale climate resilient infrastructure project involving multiple countries in the Orange-Senqu River Basin was at pre-feasibility stage. Our research investigated this transboundary decision context to 1) understand how concepts indicative of a transition from a predict-and-control to resilience-oriented decision paradigm (i.e., uncertainty and multifunctionality) were conceptualized and integrated into a complex decision context and 2) explore how a group of actors with significant decision-making influence – project finance – could enable or constrain this transition. We showed that interviewees identified a wide range of uncertainties and efforts to explicitly consider them were underway. Still, the impact of these efforts was mediated by a continued reliance on established, predict-and-control decision approaches. Additionally, multifunctionality was primarily considered as direct economic benefits to various parties. Our exploratory analysis of the role of project finance actors uncovered several opportunities to enable transitions to resilience, such as expanding capacities to consider a more comprehensive scope of risk and leverage available risk mitigation measures. We conclude with a future research agenda, both to further investigate how multiple decision paradigms interact in real-world decision making and to leverage opportunities for finance actors to enable transitions to resilience.