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This article explores the financialisation of Brussels Airport following the acquisition in 2004 of a majority stake by the Australian Macquarie Bank. Adopting a variegated capitalism perspective, we argue for a greater sensitivity to the mutually constitutive relation between durable institutional governance structures and financialised practices injected by global investors. The case of Brussels Airport presents an informative case to examine this relation, as Macquarie has had to continuously interact with the Belgian federal state in its different guises of contractor, co-owner and regulator to implement financialisation. While Macquarie indeed brought in risks that are structurally associated with profit making through financial means, the governance of these practices is shaped by the Belgian state's distinctive and pragmatic approach to infrastructure privatisation: the state enables these practices, but also contests them in case of a direct clash with its interests. Meanwhile, the regulatory environment marks the contradictory meeting point of two varieties of capitalism: while the light-handed regulatory framework is inspired by the UK's airport industry, the Belgian regulator does not possess similar abilities as a UK regulator, and resultantly, informal negotiations between the stakeholders are more influential in the airport's governance. The case of Brussels Airport shows that the state plays an active role in constituting global capitalism, yet also shapes how financialisation works out on the ground. To understand the tensions that mark the governance of financialised infrastructure, it is therefore imperative to be sensitive to the local, historical and political trajectories that underwrite the variegated outcomes of financialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the insertion of urban infrastructure into the risk-taking world of financialisation, techniques for capturing added value from underlying revenue streams, from securitisation and derivatives to the structuring of bond and equity returns, have come to the fore. A value model, based on extraction through interest and dividends paid, as well as multiple fees, in our view, has benefited investors and financial intermediaries alike. Through the example of Carlsbad desalination plant in San Diego, California, the paper sets out to show how a piece of drinking water infrastructure was translated as a value asset to match the needs of institutional investors in the USA and beyond. The geography of value capture and its distribution globally is shown to be not simply financially innovative, but also spatially innovative and perhaps best understood through its topological spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]