Frontier financialization: Urban infrastructure in the United Kingdom

Abstract

This article contributes to critical social scientific understanding of the significance of state power to the furtherance of the financialization of socioeconomic life. Drawing on the poststructural theories of power of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, the concepts of “diagram” and “dispositif” are developed to foreground how changes in modalities and relations of power are manifest in shifting governmental rationalities and contingent policy interventions that attempt to advance financialization processes. The article's conceptual claims are illustrated through an analysis of the financialization of urban infrastructure that focuses on the United Kingdom's first ever National Infrastructure Plan (NIP), enacted between 2010 and 2015. The NIP is shown to have marked a step‐change in the UK state's approach to the governing of ostensibly public urban infrastructure, one that sought to reconfigure privately owned, market‐operated, and privately financed infrastructures as a “new asset class” to be prospected for value by global investors. As the NIP problematized the private debt financing of urban infrastructure, it was through the diagram of governmental planning that the apparent limit points of financialization processes were identified and confronted, and through specific dispositif that attempts were made to extend the frontier of financialization.

Finance beyond function: Three causal explanations for financialization

“…Finance is noteworthy for manifesting itself in the minutiae of the social world, as theories of the financialization of "everyday" life demonstrate (cf. Davis 2009, 191-234;Langley 2008;Martin 2002;van der Zwan 2014, 111-14). Much of this literature examines the consequences of financialization as a new cultural frame that corrupts sociality, or at least inserts it into a new capitalist framework (Bear et al 2015).…”

“…As Callon (1998) emphasizes, people and their organizations are not by nature homo economicus, acting calculatedly with purely instrumental, economic, or political motives. Rather, such calculative agency must be assembled (see Langley 2008Langley , 2018. This assemblage in which economic action takes place is infused with (often material) cultural practices-norms, conventions, regulations, wires, screens, and the built environment (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002;Knorr Cetina and Grimpe 2008;Lépinay 2011;MacKenzie 2006).…”

“…She dissects state power by examining how legitimacy is assembled in government capital market masterplans, in the architecture of state financial institutions, and in the ritualized performances of state and elite financial actors in capital market conferences. Similarly, Langley (2018) argues that controversial UK government policies for financing urban infrastructure cannot be explained by the objective existence of a "finance gap"; rather, one must examine the contested cultural practices that rendered the problem and shaped alternative courses of government action. Langley does so by carefully analyzing the National Infrastructure Plan documents to reveal how agency was both strategically and experimentally assembled.…”

Gendered redistribution and family debt: The ambiguities of a cash transfer program in Brazil

“…In most cases financialization constitutes a response to the evolution of the global economic systems-away from production, and into financial speculation (Arrighi 2010;Harvey 2007aHarvey , 2007b. As the literature documents (Langley 2018), state-led financialization allows financial and political elites to restructure redistributive mechanisms and skim them in their favor.…”

Finance/security/life

“…Consider, for example, how the growth of a range of green financial marketshelpfully categorized by Sian Sullivan (2012) as including 'nature finance', 'nature banking', and 'nature derivatives' -is increasingly central to governmental programmes that attempt to secure the ecological conditions of contemporary life (see also Cooper, 2010). Not dissimilarly, harnessing financial markets is also increasingly regarded as crucial to governmental programmes that seek to secure the urban infrastructures (e.g., energy, transportation, digital) that enable the exchanges and flows of contemporary life (Langley, 2017b). Rather than retrenching under the weight of its own contradictions, then, processes that securitize finance may actually be extending their reach across the governance of contemporary life.…”