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This Special Issue attempts to clarify how urban infrastructure is being funded, financed and governed. In this commentary, I seek to engage the topic of the Special Issue as a whole – infrastructure financialisation and its governance – albeit through examples provided by individual article contributions. It is a collection emphasising the tangled interaction between public and private, urging a view of financialisation beyond the binary states vs. markets, and highlighting the multiple actors with multiple agendas at play. The articles provide richly detailed accounts of how the local state remains active, participatory and deeply – if not daily – involved in infrastructure financialisation, even/especially when finance is at its most influential. Not without its limitations, three occlusions in this Special Issue present opportunities for future research, namely the need to: i) extend critical analyses of financialisation; ii) enhance related research on social infrastructure, operational phase processes and treatment of the global South; and iii) advance academic analysis of alternatives to infrastructure financialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Debates around infrastructure tend to focus on the global North, yet in the global South demand for infrastructure is huge and we see new and emergent actors engaged in finance and construction; China being pre-eminent among them. China's interests in the global South have grown apace over the past decade, especially in terms of accessing resources and securing infrastructure deals. The role of Chinese banks and State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in financing and building the projects reveals a blurring between geopolitical and commercial interests and processes. The article situates China's entry into the global South as part of a geopolitics that is simultaneously geoeconomic and interrogates these issues through case studies of Chinese-backed projects in Ghana and Cambodia. These projects are spatially and politically complex, with China adopting a range of financing models – often including an element of resource swaps – in which bank finance is critical and marks the Chinese as different from Western financiers. These international deals are secured at the political elite level and so bypass established forms of national governance and accountability in the recipient countries, while the turnkey construction projects remain locally enclaved. The cases also show that wider developmental benefits are limited, with 'ordinary' citizens – especially those in the rural areas – gaining relatively little from these major energy projects and the benefits accruing to urban-based elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]