Infrastructure Governance in Times of Crises: A Research Agenda for Australian Cities

A Systematic Literature Review of Infrastructure Governance: Cross-sectoral Lessons for Transformative Governance Approaches

“…Crises are a challenging notion to define, often subjective and contextual, and sometimes strategically deployed narratives (Alizadeh et al 2022; Jhagroe and Frantzeskaki 2016). In this literature, crisis is often understood as a temporary shock or substantial contextual factor in infrastructure matters, but rarely conceptualised as an ongoing and frequently recurring context for understanding modes of infrastructure governance, or in terms of multiple intersecting crises and the need for resilience as a governance mode (Chester et al 2021).…”

“…Various frameworks are posited for understanding types of infrastructure governance integration (often discussed within sectoral silos) (Alexandra and Norman 2020; Guthrie, De Silva, and Furlong 2017; McLean 2018; van de Meene, Bettini, and Head 2020). For example, Arts et al (2016) distinguish between different infrastructural dimensions that can conceptually guide integration efforts (particularly transport and land use). McLean (2018) categorises integration based on the circumstances and motivations from which it arose.…”

“…McLean (2018) categorises integration based on the circumstances and motivations from which it arose. A wide range of conditions are similarly posited by others as supporting integrated infrastructure approaches, including aligning and making transparent the goals of infrastructure integration (Alexandra 2017; McLean 2018; Zonneveld and Spaans 2014), and integration between infrastructure and place contexts (Arts et al 2016). Conversely, common barriers to infrastructure integration include issues of scalar mismatch, such as disconnects between infrastructure impact, responsibility and authority (Makarewicz et al 2018), path dependency issues such as legacies of poor knowledge transfer (Schuch et al 2017), ownership issues such as through legal and regulatory separation of infrastructure types (Arts et al 2016), and poor evaluation processes leading to mismatched funding (George et al 2019).…”

“…Planning sustainable places relies on equitably meeting complex infrastructure needs. This sits in tension with current contexts of major governance gaps and multiple intersecting crises (Alizadeh et al 2022). Such crises, intertwined with urban infrastructure futures, include the advancing risks of the climate emergency (Meerow and Woodruff 2020;Oke et al 2021), the pervasive implications of the COVID-19 pandemic (Enright and Ward 2021), and for settler-colonial countries such as Australia, the need to engage with the context of planning infrastructure on unceded First Nations land (Porter 2018).…”

“…The main aim of our research is to develop an understanding of emerging infrastructure governance approaches and literature trends and gaps to inform more robust research and policy discourses surrounding infrastructure governance. As a starting point, several key thematic areas identified through a preliminary interpretive literature review of infrastructure governance gaps (see Alizadeh et al 2022) were used to structure the approaches to the initial search and thematic analyses. These themes are informed by the settler-colonial context within which we perform our research, the recent increase in discourse on times of crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the advancing climate emergency, and the widespread context of fragmented governance regimes challenging integrated long-term planning.…”