Infrastructure decision making needs to flow from community decision makers to financiers, not the other way round. Direct democracy models must ensure that communities have access to a diverse array of experts, including futurists in touch with realistic scenarios around sufficiently meeting the basic needs of future generations and the resources that would be fairly available to them.
Getting infrastructure development right is vital to true social and ecological progress toward a sustainable way of living. I spent part of my career in the sector and I somewhat agree with those who call for a long-term forward-looking plan and more creative solutions. Packaging a long term programme of work (like the Watercare Services Limited Enterprise Model) is helpful for enabling designers and constructors to invest in local managerial expertise and a skilled workforce.
But we must layer far greater creativity into answering the upstream question: what infrastructure will we truly need in 50-100 years’ time to deliver universal minimum standards of wellbeing AND what can global stocks and local renewable sources provide in terms of resources and energy to build, maintain and use it within safe and just planetary boundaries. These are not questions that profit maximising businesses, investors and financiers are asking, because their interest is in earning returns off infrastructure.
Direct democracy decision making at community level with access to diverse specialists, including futurists who are in touch with plausible scenarios, needs to happen first. When financiers are talking about how to build and fund an expanded road network, it’s a strong signal that those early korero to make inclusive, informed decisions about feasible futures are being overlooked.
We must also consider the funding question. Banks and the newly forming government, while they will be hunting for creative solutions to fund infrastructure, such as Public-Private Partnerships, are unlikely to wander beyond their conventional worldview and traditional toolkit. However NZ is in the enviable position (unlike many European nations) of having a sovereign currency and we could apply Modern Monetary Theory to bring about the optionality of funding infrastructure with government money that is not debt.
Describing our infrastructure situation as a crisis is driving a sense of urgency to make BAU decisions faster, when what we really need is a completely new approach. Our actual crisis is incrementalism, with infrastructure being a prime example of what 50 years of it looks like. Let’s not make it 100.
Image by Navneet Gida on Unsplash.
Heliocene 