Derisking failure: rethinking the promises of infrastructure-led development

Since the 2008 financial crisis an emerging regime of ‘infrastructure-led development’ places connectivity infrastructure at its centre. We begin this article with the proposition that many of the developmental promises associated with infrastructure have already failed, yet these failures rarely involve a rethinking of what underpins their promises. Drawing on ethnographic research on a failed project in the Republic of Georgia, the deep sea port of Anaklia, we suggest that an ethnographic engagement with failed infrastructure is necessary in order to tease out, and consequently challenge, the power geometries inherent in infrastructure-led development. We show that failure is constantly foregrounded in infrastructural projects such as the Anaklia port, yet a series of discursive, legal and economic infrastructures are put in place to disavow it. These infrastructures must be understood as part of a larger, global, consensus that places the right to accumulate capital above care for populations and ecosystems.