Chapter 5 examines the creation and evolution of Mexico’s Seguro Popular, a health reform implemented in 2003 to expand insurance coverage for the uninsured. Despite the existence of institutionalized political parties, the legislation was driven mainly by technocrats rather than by programmatic party commitment. The National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, PAN), in power at the time, endorsed the reform but did not participate in shaping its content because it did not align with its core values. The Health Secretary and the Seguro Popular technocratic team introduced the initiative, lobbied for support, and were in charge of key decisions. The reform was passed in Congress, largely because it promised increased resources to state governments, rather than due to ideological consensus. Its implementation met with significant challenges. Coverage increased, but funding and infrastructure lagged, limiting access to services. Political parties failed to ensure sustainable funding and robust oversight. The reform ultimately struggled with insufficient programmatic commitment from PAN, PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional; Institutional Revolutionary Party), and PRD (Partido de la Revolución Democrática; Party of the Democratic Revolution), which undermined the quality of the legislation and its long-term success. Seguro Popular was replaced in 2020, and its end reflected both partisan competition and the original lack of cross-party support and detailed policy design.

Chapter 7 explores Egypt, a consolidated autocracy. Historically colonized by the French and British, Egypt also received substantial financial support from the United States. Egypt was initially less involved with Europe’s external migration approach throughout the 1990s and 2000s in comparison to neighboring countries, but in 2017 the EU and Egypt signed an agreement under the EUTF worth €60 million. The funding was divided among seven projects, ranging from institutional capacity building to job generation and entrepreneurship. The majority of EUTF funding went toward infrastructure improvement in line with the current President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s domestic priorities. In this way, migration management aid reinforced Egypt’s authoritarian rule through substitution (pathway II) and by channeling funding through patronage networks (pathway III). The EUTF’s predominant spending on local infrastructure projects tied beneficiaries to government networks, and also allowed the government to redirect its funding toward mega infrastructure projects built through military contracts, thereby further capacitating the regime’s repressive apparatus.

Chapter 6 shifts from procurement to the spatial allocation of local public goods, examining how partisan considerations shape the placement of infrastructure in communities. It begins by outlining the formal planning processes, in which bureaucrats are expected to design allocations based on community needs. However, interviews and prior research reveal frequent deviations from these plans, often driven by political pressure. Using data from Ghana’s Central Region, the chapter shows a strong correlation between the ruling party’s prior vote share and the number of projects a community receives. At the same time, the analysis highlights the role of need: poorer communities are more likely to secure projects than wealthier ones. These patterns suggest a dual influence – politicians seek to reward co-partisan communities, while bureaucrats attempt to prioritize developmental considerations. To probe this further, the chapter employs a survey experiment across eighty local governments. Results confirm that bureaucrats perceive both partisanship and need as influential, but partisan alignment often outweighs need in determining outcomes. The evidence thus reveals a tug-of-war between politicians and bureaucrats, with distributive outcomes shaped by the balance of partisan incentives and bureaucratic resistance. This politicization of allocation ultimately undermines equitable and efficient public service delivery.

Cities concentrate opportunity and inequality. This chapter shows how rapid urbanization has generated both prosperity and exclusion. It analyses the governance challenges of megacities, including infrastructure gaps, housing crises, and fragmented authority. It advocates for institutional reforms to promote inclusive urban development, where growth does not mean gated prosperity for the few but opportunity for the many.

This chapter explores developments after standards for pre-project consultation were raised in 2013. The six cases examined in this chapter, funded by multilateral and national development banks operating in the Asia Pacific region after heightened community engagement policies, were introduced underscore a number of key insights. The post-2013 cases broadly demonstrate a number of key improvements including greater rigour in consultation and diligence mechanisms, heightened precision in identifying issues of community concern, higher pre-project diligence and screening standards, ongoing environmental and technical monitoring, the presence of locally trained mediators, skill development for consultation participants, and a longer-term view of community welfare and responsive grievance remedies. Shortcomings persisted in some cases, including instances of duress, lack of information disclosure, fraud, limited access to consultation mechanisms and environmental harm leading to project cessation in two cases when the adverse social impacts were seen to outweigh potential benefits. On the whole, corresponding with more rigorous community consultation and diligence standards, during this phase, the number of stalled/cancelled and litigated case declined by 33%, the percentages of cases brought to court declined by 16%, and the number of cases pursuing party agreement through mediation or negotiation increased by 50% compared with ad-hoc discretionary consultation practices prior to 2013.

This chapter presents a series of six investor–community case studies in the Asia Pacific region during the pre-2013 period, during which pre-project community engagement and accountability on the part of infrastructure investment banks were relatively less stringent, in order to understand the impact of relatively relaxed community engagement standards on subsequent grievance claims. This set of six cases will be compared with a set of six cases presented in Chapter 6 after heightened diligence standards were introduced after 2013. The cases reviewed in this chapter were either sole financed projects by the World Bank/International Finance Corporation or collaborative projects with the Asian Development Bank and European Investment Bank in the Asia Pacific region. The sectors include investment in transport, the extractive industry and special economic zone development. The key finding of this chapter is that during this pre-2013 discretionary community consultation phase, most cases resulted in either full or partial project cancellation, delay, suspension, compensation for harms or transfer to local courts for resolution. A small portion were dismissed due to insufficient information. In total, of the six cases examined, four were cancelled or stalled, one proceeded to court litigation and one was closed. The cases highlight the risks of insufficient attention to community consultation.

This chapter explores the rise of US imperial militarism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the settler colonial American West and overseas colonies in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific. Beyond sketching a general account of this period, the chapter argues that US military colonization was both a set of distinct encounters and a larger project connected by shared repertoires of violence; transfers of expert knowledge; and ideologies of racialized dominance. It also understands US imperial militarism in infrastructural terms. Military actors and organizations served not only as the sharp edge of colonization, but also initial – and sometimes primary – agents of colonial state-building. Longer term, American imperialism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era created the conditions of possibility, both ideologically and materially, for global elaborations of US empire that persist today.

Work on racial capitalism and the wholesale financialization of the planetary commons has long sought to clarify the pathological nature of such acts of imperial expansion as land enclosure, expropriation, and the reification of life into the commodity form; so too, the degree to which these acts of state terror, which have insured the continued production of new commodity frontiers in the service of resource extraction, are bolstered by developmentalist narratives that sublimate genocidal campaigns of dispossession in service to the enabling myth of limitless plenitude on a finite planet. Antagonizing such fictions, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man and Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus bring to life the otherwise “brute matter” of Chamoiseau’s plantation and Viramontes’ poisoned orchards. As argued in this chapter, both novels also demonstrate the affordances of disruptive temporal forms for interrupting the smooth contours of commodity chains in which enslaved persons are rendered – politically and materially speaking – as themselves commodities. Slave Old Man and Under the Feet of Jesus are anti-extractivist works that center critiques of racial and fossil capital, while also antagonizing the forward march of global capitalist production, which has long relied on the invisibility and disposability of the planetary poor.

This chapter examines the infrastructural turn in the humanities through a literary-critical lens, focusing on energy infrastructures as central to the Anthropocene. It foregrounds an expanded method of “reading for infrastructure” (Martens and Vermeulen, 2021) that moves beyond material visibility to legibility, encompassing affective, temporal, and socio-psychological dimensions. Through comparative readings of contemporary oil fictions, David Huebert’s Oil People (2024) and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010), the chapter explores how petro-infrastructures shape subjectivities and imaginaries across Global North and Global South contexts. While Oil People reflects the normalized, ‘boring’ presence of settler-colonial oil infrastructures in Canada, Oil on Water foregrounds the violent legibility of neocolonial energy infrastructures in the Niger Delta. The comparative reading demonstrates how legibility, temporality, and affect reshape utopian/dystopian registers: invisibility yields complacency, while stark visibility foregrounds rupture and agency. Ultimately, the chapter argues that literary‑critical attention to hard energy infrastructure uncovers the geopolitical stakes of the Anthropocene and invites a more accountable, decolonial imagination of infrastructural futures.

Data-centric socialities are media-centric socialities. One way to make sense of the novelty of digital media is to ask what scientists can do with them that they could not do before. This chapter does so for digital imaging in astronomy. It explores two arithmetic operations – adding and subtracting digital exposures pixel by pixel – and their surprising practical and organizational consequences. Setting out from a lecture on image processing to undergraduate students, it traces astronomers’ understandings of digital data’s affordances. It argues that the introduction of charge-coupled devices in the 1980s provided solutions to a set of practical problems that astronomers had formulated with increasing clarity since the 1950s. Subsequently, new organizational possibilities for astronomical research emerged. These include mobilizing data beyond local contexts, rendering abstract time as an object of management, sharing data as nonrivalrous goods, assessing others’ work remotely, and building new forms of collaboration – elements of a novel medial middle ground in data-rich science.

This chapter examines the career of Wei Liaoweng, a Southern Song official and Neo-Confucian scholar, to explore the multifaceted roles and responsibilities of local administrators during a period of political turbulence and social transformation. It investigates how he navigated overlapping identities while negotiating between ideological commitments and the practical demands of governance. Although Wei devoted significant effort to fortifying local defenses and securing revenue, his administration was far from purely extractive. He worked to alleviate the economic burdens of local residents, developed water management systems, promoted education by building academies and supporting government schools, and implemented social welfare and public health programs. Wei’s Neo-Confucian convictions informed an activist vision of governance that emphasized community building and collaboration between local officials and literati. His career illustrates the dynamic interplay between intellectual and political life, the integration of state and local initiatives, and the critical role of personal networks in sustaining effective local administration.

Oil has seriously impacted the institutional development of the state in the Arabian Peninsula. More specifically, the sudden and unprecedented acquisition of massive oil revenues resulted in the freezing of the state’s formal and informal institutions, at the point at which petrodollars were injected into the state’s coffers. From then on, state leaders were able to deploy the state’s wealth to dictate the pace and direction of institutional change. Over time, any institutional change has been directed towards enhancing regime security, and the pace of change has been calculated and deliberately slow. Any political opening has been dictated by the logic of state power maximization (in relation to society). At the same time, partly to ensure its popular legitimacy and partly through the vision of its leaders, the state has deployed its massive wealth both to foster rapid economic and infrastructural development, and to enhance the living standards of its citizens. In other words, whereas oil may have stunted institutional development –– i.e., an institution’s curse –– it has been an economic blessing.

Chapter 3, ‘The Amazon as a Place for Global Extractivism: Rethinking Extractivism and Infrastructure in Extractive Frontiers,” explores the governance of extractivism in the Amazon by reflecting on IIRSA infrastructure development and how it relates to extractive activities. The analysis of the entanglements between mega-infrastructures and extractive industries also allows a deeper understanding of extractivism. From a scalar dimension, the Amazon becomes an example of global extractivism, a place where infrastructure and extraction coalesce to feed the global economy and the endless transnational circulation of commodities. From material/immaterial dimensions, infrastructure might be a kind of extractivism in itself when its main goal is profit-making from construction, detached from real prospects for connectivity. In turn, its immaterial dimension refers to how extractive logics permeate infrastructure activities, such as the monetarizing of the knowledge and needs of locals to justify the projects’ socio-economic viability. Considering the re-dimensioning of extractivism, the Chapter provides reflections on how it promotes international economic integration while limiting environmental integration in the Amazon. This raises crucial insights on the proper ways to govern internationally extractive activities.