What is Infrastructure For? Social and Economic Sustainability Goals

Principle 2: Social and economic development

‘If you’re asking me to choose between conservation and development, I’m going to choose development every time.' Community worker in Democratic Republic of Congo

This is part of a series inspired by the book Sustainable Infrastructure. What is infrastructure for? And do we really have to make a choice between meeting people's needs and protecting the environment, as the quote above suggests? 

The purpose of most infrastructure is to improve social or economic outcomes (and let's face it, when one third of the world's people have no access to sanitation, there's no shortage of need) and that's why economic issues have traditionally been the biggest influence over project scoping and delivery.

For example, many projects are justified on the basis of a cost-benefit ratio, which may consider only benefits within the organisation (eg reduced maintenance and operation costs for a railway) or may additional calculate the wider economic benefits to users (eg the business case for HS2).

But the social dimension has been the least studied and often overlooked aspect of sustainable development, which includes basic human needs such as housing as well as culture, education and skills and human rights. Sustainable Infrastructure discusses a number of different social and economic objectives for infrastructure, which have several possible modes of response: directly meeting needs (eg build a new road), indirectly addressing issues through how projects are delivered (eg train apprentices, use local labour/suppliers) and social outcomes (eg aim to attract apprentices from disadvantaged groups). 

Goals typically served directly as outputs of infrastructure projects

Sustainable Infrastructure (ref 1) identifies 7 major goals which can be addressed directly through an infrastructure response aimed at meeting a specific demand by using quantified output measures eg number of children in school, adult literacy rates, number of people undernourished or without access to an improved water supply. Where possible, other issues should be included as secondary targets eg education might attach some healthcare and food security goals as well as basic literacy. These are the basic things we need for a decent quality of life - the items starred form part of the UN's Human Development Index (HDI) measure of how "developed" a country is. 
The 7 direct goals are:

• food security,
• water and sanitation,
• healthcare and life expectancy*,
• education*,
• energy (both electricity and fuel for cooking);
• mobility (eg roads and transport infrastructure that allows people to access jobs, healthcare and buy or sell goods/services) and
• resilience (the ability of a system to cope with disturbance) in the face of multiple dimensions of poverty and vulnerability to disasters. This will be covered at greater length in future posts, because building in resilience against future risk, particularly climate change is now an essential requirement for all infrastructure.

Goals which can be delivered as broader indirect outcomes of infrastructure projects:

• Income* (eg 1 in 5 people across the world earn less than $1.25 per day, defined using purchasing power parity rather than exchange rates)
• Employment and Jobs
• Wealth and ownership of key resources such as land and access to water supplies. Gross inequality makes it extremely difficult to achieve a fair outcome, and infrastructure policies should ensure that improved quality of life is shared with as many of the population as possible. Currently the richest 1% of adults in the world own 40% of the world’s wealth, while the poorest 3 billion people own just 1% of the wealth. 

Social goals

• Social Inequality (eg proportion of people living on less than the median income) – can be addressed through the income, jobs and wealth goals above
• Gender inequality (employment gap between men and women) – can be addressed through the income, jobs and wealth goals above. Note that other aspects of gender inequality such as gender-based violence and lack of representation in decision-making bodies are also important but require different approaches in addition to than improved physical infrastructure.
• Voice (eg ability to express your opinion and be heard, democratic processes, effective dialogue and consultation between communities and those who build, operate and benefit from infrastructure) 

The challenge is to develop infrastructure in a way which delivers more than just economic growth: we need to explicitly consider these wider goals and impacts on every project.

Reference:
Sustainable Infrastructure: Principles into Practice, Richard Fenner and Charles Ainger, ICE Publishing 2014.

See also:

• Sustainable Infrastructure: Introduction to the series
• A Rocha: Should relieving human poverty take precedence over environmental issues?
• Principle 1: Exploring Planetary Boundaries
• Principle 3: Intergenerational Stewardship (or Why Doing It For The Kids Is Not Good Enough)