2 Infrastructure Everywhere

Key Concepts

In this chapter we will:

• Define infrastructure
• Learn that shared infrastructure depends on collective action
• Become familiar with the different types of infrastructure

2.1 Introduction

In this book, we focus on infrastructure. With infrastructure, we refer to structures that enable systems to produce certain outcomes. “Infra” refers to “below” and literally infrastructure means the “underlying structure”. The colloquial use of infrastructure refers to roads, bridges, dams, water and sewage systems, but in this book we have a broader interpretation of structures underlying and supporting our society.

Some infrastructure is private, e.g. a factory or your house, others are shared, e.g. a sewage system. In this book, we focus mainly on shared infrastructures. Common examples include roads, bridges, and electricity distribution systems, as well as internet communication protocols and computer software. We will discuss different types of infrastructure throughout the book in more detail. A basic aspect of infrastructure is that it requires investment to create and maintain. In the case of public infrastructure (roads, dams, electrical grid, electromagnetic spectrum) that is shared, society must invest collectively to create and maintain the infrastructure. Who pays and who can use the infrastructure are critical collective choice questions. Are new roads paid for  from a tax on gasoline or by all taxpayers? Is the road open to everyone, or only for those who can pay the toll?

Humans are not the only species who have shared infrastructure. In fact, shared infrastructure is an essential feature of many social organisms who live together in large groups and often cooperate on certain tasks. For bees, it is the hive. For termites, it is the mound. In these cases, shared infrastructure provides controlled environments where resources can be concentrated to increase fitness. There are many types of infrastructure among the diversity of ant species. Some create highways using pheromone trails, grow fungus, remove dead individuals and waste as a sanitary system, and have armies to protect the nest.  In human societies, we share infrastructure such as roads, water management, sewage, and telecommunications systems which help concentrate resources, including food, water, energy, information, and people, in space and time. Although humans have more complex infrastructure systems than social insects, the basic concept remains the same.

We focus on shared infrastructure in this book since it is a broader concept than shared resources used in the study of governing the commons. In the next section we discuss the collective action problem of creating and maintaining shared infrastructure.

2.2 Shared Infrastructure as a collective action problem

In the study of the commons, the focus was typically on extraction from a pool of shared resources of some type, as if those resources are coming from natural pristine resources. Productive land shared in common depends on long term investments to maintain the productivity of the land. Sheep grazing on Hardin’s pastures were moved around by herders to spread the grazing pressure. The manure from sheep fertilized the land, and grazing killed small saplings from trees and shrubs, stimulating the regeneration of grass. In fact, by careful herding of the sheep, a productive pasture can be created. Hence, the pasture Garrett Hardin referred to in his essay on the commons was a shared infrastructure, not an open access pristine resource.

In creating shared infrastructure, one needs to invest time in the creation and maintenance of the infrastructure. Herein lies the collective action problem, since one could freeride on the efforts of others. Not all infrastructure is shared. Infrastructure can be private and the responsibility of creation and maintenance lies with an individual. For example, houses can be owned by individuals, and those individual home owners are responsible for the maintenance of the house. There might be regulations related to the quality of upkeep you are expected to have about your house (e.g. by a homeowner association (HOA)), but it is the responsibility of the homeowner to do or pay for the maintenance. A household could go off the grid by installing solar panels and a water tank. This is not uncommon in rural areas where the cost of providing shared infrastructure could become too high for the community to bear.

Another infrastructure challenge is the distribution of the affordances created by infrastructure. Who can access the road, every car, or does one need to pay a fee? Who can participate in a conference, only members of an organization, or is it open for anyone? Defining who shares in the outcomes of shared infrastructure impacts the incentives for people to contribute to the construction and maintenance of it.

2.3  Different types of infrastructure

Infrastructure is a general concept and can be described in physical terms or in economic terms. The most natural definition is the economic one: infrastructure is a collection of materials (e.g., machines) and information (e.g., knowledge about how to use machines) that can produce a stream of materials (food, cars, houses) and information (music, movies) that society values. The second key feature of infrastructure is that it requires investment (a so-called opportunity cost) to produce and maintain (machines must be built, and maintained; without practice, skills decline) and infrastructure typically has little value in its own right (farm machinery isn’t exciting in its own right—its main value comes through its capacity to produce food). There are different forms of infrastructure that come together to produce output (you can’t operate farm machinery without knowledge) and we discuss these different forms of infrastructure in the following sections. They can all experience collective action challenges in order to be created and/or maintained.

2.3.1  Hard infrastructure

With “hard infrastructure” we are mainly referring to human-made infrastructure such as roads, irrigation systems, and nuclear power stations. Hard infrastructure enables the production and distribution of clear freshwater, waste, energy, products, people, and information. We have infrastructure to move people in cars, trains, on water, in the air, via rail and road, and by foot and on bicycles. To facilitate the movement of people, we need energy which can be produced by various types of power generation plants or processing of fossil fuels. This energy needs to be distributed through the electrical grid, or in the case of gasoline, through a combination of trucks and roads, in order to be useful.

As you can see, hard infrastructure provides the key underlying structure for society and, as such, is too large to be produced by individuals (e.g., few individuals are wealthy enough to build the Golden Gate bridge on their own—it cost around $340 million in today’s dollars). It must be collectively produced and, as a result, various types of collective action problems must be solved in order to produce functional infrastructure. Who will create the infrastructure, and where will it be located? After it is created, who is responsible for maintenance? The difficulty these problems pose is evidenced by the fact that infrastructure in the U.S. is failing by some accounts. Examples include falling bridges, blackouts and flooded neighborhoods. According to the website the U.S. needs to invest 3.6 trillion dollars (15.7% of 2021 GDP) over a five-year period to maintain the function of its infrastructure, which is more than $2,000 a year for each person living in the U.S. over that period. We discuss in the next section some of the collective action problems related to provisioning shared infrastructure. First, we want to discuss some other types of infrastructure.

2.3.2 Soft infrastructure

With soft infrastructure we refer to the human-made “instructions” (think software for your computer) for using other types of infrastructure. Instructions require knowledge of how systems work and thus involve significant investment. They are also absolutely essential to generate valuable outputs. The computer (hard infrastructure) on which this book was written is useless without software (soft infrastructure). In this sense, soft infrastructure can be thought of in general as the instructions by which society is run (across all levels of organization from the individual, to neighborhoods, to counties, to nations, and the United Nations). One type of soft infrastructure essential to the topic of this book is that of “institutions.” Recall that institutions are rules (instructions, mostly in the form of if-then statements) that structure repeated interactions between people. To be effective, these institutional arrangements must be combined with other types of infrastructure (i.e., all types of infrastructure necessary for organizations to function such as buildings, communication, transportation) which create, implement and monitor the rules. Examples include the rules by which local government functions, the protocols by which crime labs and emergency services are run, the constitutional law upon which the supreme court bases its decisions, and the tax law by which the tax collector functions. Soft infrastructure enables societies to solve collective action problems and coordinate their activities.

2.3.3  Natural infrastructure

This is the hard infrastructure that is not man-made but still is critical for society. Wetlands absorb and filtrate water, trees capture water and reduce erosion, and bees pollinate flowers. Some people may use the term “ecosystem services” to refer to natural infrastructure but those services only exist within an anthropomorphic context. In our view, ecosystems are forms of infrastructure and humans can limit or enhance the capacity and performance of those infrastructures through the use of other types of infrastructures. That is, “services” only flow in coupled infrastructure systems! Without knowledge of how to hunt or which plants are useful (human infrastructure—see below), etc. ecosystems do not produce services.

2.3.4  Human infrastructure

To throw a spear, solve a differential equation or drive a car, you need to train your brain and muscles. The first time you sit behind a steering wheel might be scary and each action is done deliberately. But when you practice enough, it becomes a routine. Human infrastructure relates to the build up of human capacity to do a certain activity. This could be the knowledge of how ecology works for the hunter-gatherer, knowledge of seed varieties and soil characteristics for the agriculturalists, knowledge of 2-D projection for the painter, knowledge of stone for the sculptor, knowledge of machinery for the industrialist, or knowledge of kinesiology for the athlete. But it can also relate to the capacity of your muscles, and having muscle memory, to play an instrument, lift 100 kg, run a marathon, or drive a car.

Human capacity is itself infrastructure because it requires investment and can produce valued outputs (when combined with other types of infrastructure). Right now, you are investing in developing your human infrastructure. The physical manifestation of human infrastructure is the neural network in each of our brains and the muscle fibers in our body. These neural networks and muscle fibers require great effort (investment) to train to do specific tasks. Your age, your health, your diet, your gut flora, all impact your capacity to do specific tasks. One might argue that we are also part of natural infrastructure. This is correct, but for analytical purposes it is useful to define this as a special class of natural infrastructure called human infrastructure.

2.3.5  Social infrastructure

Social infrastructure refers to the relationships we have with others. These relationships (e.g., trust) are essential for our economy to function. Imagine the number of times you needed help from a friend or relative to get something done. What would you have done without friendship? Hire someone? Think of the trouble of hiring someone to do something you would ask a friend to do. The “trouble” of relying on markets (to hire someone, you would need a labor market for “miscellaneous friend tasks”) in economic jargon is “transaction cost.” Social infrastructure reduces transaction costs. Metaphorically, social infrastructure is the grease that reduces the friction of human interaction and allows the machinery of society to function. Further, building trust (either via friendships or professional relationships) is extremely time-intensive (i.e., requires significant investment). Thus, because social infrastructure produces benefits and requires investment, it is infrastructure.

2.4  Beyond the commons

By focusing on shared infrastructure, we aim to extend the study of the commons to a broader set of problems. We see the traditional study of the commons as the study of maintaining the use of shared natural infrastructure and evaluate which soft infrastructure configurations lead to desirable outcomes. Increasingly, the commons perspective is being applied to new topic areas like knowledge commons, health care, outer space and urban environments, where we see a prominent role of hard infrastructure.

Scholars have started to talk about social-ecological systems, and social-ecological-technical systems. To us those systems are all variations of infrastructure and it makes sense to have a more unifying framework instead of defining all kinds of applications (social, ecological, technical). By deriving understanding of the fundamental governance problems with infrastructure, we can apply those insights to many different applications, including those which we may not yet have anticipated.

2.5  Critical reflections

Infrastructure is a collective structure that enables systems to produce certain outcomes. The creation and maintenance of shared infrastructure is a collective action problem. There are different types of infrastructure such as hard infrastructure, soft infrastructure, natural infrastructure, human infrastructure, and social infrastructure.

2.6  Make yourself think

1. What shared infrastructures have you used today?

2. In what ways do you contribute to the maintenance of infrastructure? Give three examples.

3. If you find a mistake in the textbook, please let us know. This is an example of contributing to the maintenance of the shared soft infrastructure: the textbook!