UCLA

In the post-2008 global economy infrastructure development and financing have risen to the top of the development agenda, emerging as a contested field for global investments involving seemingly divergent interests, objectives, rationalities and practices. Whereas multilateral development banks such as the World Bank advocate the market-based Public-Private Partnership (PPP) aimed at attracting private finance and deepening marketized governance, China is forging a state-capitalist alternative through its Belt and Road Initiative. These models are far from mutually exclusive. Through a conjunctural approach, this research examines the broader trade and financial interdependencies in which these models are entangled, and the geopolitical and geoeconomic objectives enframing the emergent infrastructure regime. Developing nations caught in the crosscurrents of these approaches and interests face uncertain risks and possibilities. In Indonesia I show how these approaches are grounded in infrastructure projects, framed by competition between China and Japan. Specifically, in Jakarta, I examine the coming together of these models, visions and practices as they articulate with the political-economies of city and state, and their path-dependent restructuring precipitated by the speculative 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. I show how political interests and developmental objectives of state and city governments are entangled with the speculative capital accumulation strategies of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), shaping the speculative state-space of the post-colonial metropolis. With a number of new rail transit projects in the city-region driving a boom in Transit-Oriented Development, SOEs speculate on market conditions and the ‘world-class city’ dreams of middle-class residents to leverage their propertied assets. In the territorially and institutionally fragmented landscape of metropolitan Jakarta this financial speculation is equally premised on political speculation around the planning and execution of the projects, enabled by elite informality and statecraft. These speculative state-spaces are also framed by the developmental politics of affordability and accessibility to the city. I examine how these strategies, practices and tensions come together to produce innovative governance arrangements in the provision and management of transport and housing.