Abstract

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis precipitated the emergence of a consensus among policymakers surrounding the state’s role in spatial planning and infrastructure-led development. This chapter argues that the belief that infrastructure was the missing ingredient in earlier rounds of neoliberal restructuring constitutes an emerging ‘infrastructure fundamentalism’. This animates national development plans whose time horizons now routinely extend two or three decades into the future. This new infrastructure time has inhibited the efforts of international financial institutions (IFIs) to foster ‘blended finance’ because planning with such extended time horizons is inherently risky. The chapter demonstrate how IFIs have sought to standardize the distribution of economic, political, and environmental risk in an attempt to future-proof profits. Its analysis confirms that while significant risks remain unaccounted for, slow operations have been launched worldwide to extend commodity frontiers and integrate markets.