In the last post “The Infrastructure Quiz” I asked what the ‘purpose’ of infrastructure is. What did you choose? If you ask this question of most people, the answer is obvious – it just isn’t the same answer for everyone!
Have a look at the following possibilities:
- For asset managers, the answer is obvious – it is to provide needed services that underpin the economy and society well being.
- For economists in the Treasuries, the answer is equally obvious – it is to kickstart the economy. (For many years we had a stop-go policy for infrastructure. Whenever the economy got overheated, governments would cut back on infrastructure spending, and whenever it slowed down, they would spend more. There was a period in the early 2000s when this was recognised for the damage it caused. But now it seems to be back again.)
- Politicians and Think tanks are the ones likely to claim that infrastructure – ‘increases productivity’ and ‘raises the standard of living’ (but they seldom spell out exactly how, for it is all regarded as self-evident.)
- For the general public (most of whom could not give any examples of infrastructure beyond roads, if that) the answer is that the purpose of infrastructure spending is to ‘create jobs’.
- Military and strategic planners often see the construction and location of infrastructure as a strategic control problem. Many politicians do the same.
- The construction industry and its lobbyists strongly believe that we not only need infrastructure to keep the industry afloat but that we need to forecast what infrastructure and where in order to enable them to plan.
So, many purposes – all ‘self evident’!
The reason there are so many answers is that Infrastructure is multi-faceted.
Almost all these answers have at least some merit. One of the difficulties in the debate is that it is easy to mistake a more peripheral benefit of infrastructure for the primary purpose.
Wouldn’t it be excellent to have an agreed list of purposes of infrastructure, ranked from primary to subsidiary? Then our planning could focus on first securing the essentials and then achieving as many concomitant benefits as possible.
But at the moment, when one party’s perceived primary benefit is not achievable or in conflict with another party’s, the discussion becomes adversarial.
Thank you Hein. Without greater community understanding of the role of infrastructure in achieving the ‘big goals’ that we have as a community, i.e. a stronger economy, greater social equity and environmental safety, it is difficult to say what is ‘peripheral’ and what ‘essential’. I think it is more than simply a matter of political conflict. It is reflective of the many different aims that we all have as individuals. In other words, the problem may not be political, but rather social and educational.
I do agree with Hein that an agreed list of purposes would help. Yet within my organisation we have one, labelled a “displacement sequence”. This implies AM decision making following this sequence. However, our AM activities and decisions are much more fuzzy, caused by, like Penny states, the political aspect. As Asset manager within a governmental agency, I do have to deal with AM decisions made not following the well thought out displacement sequence yet fuelled by political lobby. For long, I could really get annoyed till I realised this stakeholder component is also part of the sole purpose of being an AM agency. So instead of letting it annoy me, I decided by quantifying the risks for the “essential” functions when choices are made in favour of “peripheral” functionality of our infra.