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This work focuses on urban governance in the developing world, its aim being to bring a holistic perspective to the debate on urban governance in Asia and around the globe. It has been divided into three sections: The first section is on rural interventions as they influence urbanization and its problems/solutions. The second focuses on urban governance, infrastructure programs, service delivery reforms and their evaluation. The third and final section focuses on urbanization and the environment.In the first section, we present evaluations of India's rural programs including the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), and of India's Total Sanitation Campaign. This section covers the transition from rural to urban areas, and highlights coping mechanisms in urban areas and policy implications for urban governance, from the viewpoint of rural migrants.The section on urban governance, infrastructure and service delivery is the most in-depth and consists of papers that present state-of-the-art research on many aspects of infrastructure such as cost and time overruns, risks and their mitigation, assessments of the metro rail, and services such as solid waste management.The focus of the final section is on urbanization and the environment. Here we examine land use change in India, the relationship between urban form and residential energy use in Bandung, Indonesia, and end by depicting a cautiously optimistic view of Asia's urbanization-environment nexus.

In Hydraulic City Nikhil Anand explores the politics of Mumbai's water infrastructure to demonstrate how citizenship emerges through the continuous efforts to control, maintain, and manage the city's water. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai's settlements, Anand found that Mumbai's water flows, not through a static collection of pipes and valves, but through a dynamic infrastructure built on the relations between residents, plumbers, politicians, engineers, and the 3,000 miles of pipe that bind them. In addition to distributing water, the public water network often reinforces social identities and the exclusion of marginalized groups, as only those actively recognized by city agencies receive legitimate water services. This form of recognition--what Anand calls "hydraulic citizenship"--Is incremental, intermittent, and reversible

During recent decades governments all around the world were faced with a complicated set of options for investing in transport, including transport infrastructure. This publication examines main principles for determining the most appropriate models for financing transport infrastructure expenditures but also illustrates and analyses many innovative ways to finance transport infrastructure. Financing, in this context, means the provision of money at the time and in the quantity, that is needed to meet society's transport infrastructure and transport service provision needs. Thus, financing is a basic underpinning of the entire process of providing and operating transport infrastructure. Accepting the view, that transport infrastructure is needed to provide a well‐defined set of public services, at the highest‐level financing the transport sector, including transport infrastructure expenditures, is fundamentally a sovereign task, which involves determining how much of the government's available (public) resources will be channelled into the transport infrastructure, during a given period, as opposed to other policy priorities. However, this report proves that this is not the case anymore. There are many other innovative ways from which transport infrastructure construction could be funded other than the government's available (public) resources.

Global interest in technology-based growth politics is growing as technology becomes an increasingly important factor in economic competitiveness. In spite of increased efforts in many nations to develop more effective industry strategies, most of these endeavors have been ad hoc exercises rather than derived from a consistent framework. Technology Infrastructure and Competitive Position provides that missing framework. It begins by providing an overview of technology-based competition and the relevant issues. A conceptual model is developed that emphasizes the roles and impacts of the supporting infrastructure. Finally, the book addresses the interaction of corporate and governmental roles for providing technology infrastructure, some funding issues and mechanisms for cooperative planning and implementation

Intro -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- About the Authors -- 1 Social Capital: From Definition to Measurement -- 2 The Social Capital Assessment Tool: Design and Implementation -- 3 Quantitative Analysis of Social Capital Data -- 4 Qualitative Analysis of Social Capital: The Case of Agricultural Extension in Mali -- 5 Qualitative Analysis of Social Capital: The Case of Community Development in Coal Mining Areas in Orissa, India -- Annex 1 Instruments of the Social Capital Assessment Tool -- Annex 2 Does Social Capital Facilitate the Poor's Access to Credit? -- Annex 3 Does Social Capital Matter in the Delivery of Water and Sanitation? -- Index -- Tables.

The book deals with the calculation of costs for road infrastructure and congestion and the allocation of these costs to vehicle types. It focusses on heavy goods vehicles. The most important features of the book are i) the review of the state of the art, ii) a discussion of the theoretical requirements for cost accounts under the aspects of different pricing purposes, iii) a comprehensive treatment of various methodological issues for cost calculation, iv) the elaboration of empirical results for the EU-countries and Switzerland. Of particular value is the fact that existing practice of road accounts in Europe is not simply summarised but the different methodologies are applied at data sets from three countries and quantitatively compared. Further benefits are the comprehensive information and data collection, the empirical results for road infrastructure costs, the harmonised treatment of congestion costs and the policy recommendations

The migrant crisis in Europe is the largest since WWII. Millions of migrants are without hope or a source of income. However, this tragedy could present an opportunity for Europe as the EU currently faces two problems, which a large influx of labor could fix. First, decaying outdated European infrastructure and construction and secondly the abandonment of European farmland. During the 1920's the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a government program from the great depression, employed large numbers of unemployed men in land management fields. Just as the CCC addressed the environmental and social problems of its day, a modern government program modeled after the CCC could address the issues currently facing the EU. This paper lays out a roadmap for just such a program outlining how the EU could employ refugees to address the current environmental issues facing Europe. The paper also explores potential uses for abandoned farmland, such as re-utilization for agriculture, agroforestry and re-wilding as well as the management, funding and potential issues faced by such a program.

In the 1980s and '90s many countries turned to the private sector to provide infrastructure and utilities, such as gas, telephones, and highways--with the idea that market-based incentives would control costs and improve the quality of essential services. But subsequent debacles including the collapse of California's wholesale electricity market and the bankruptcy of Britain's largest railroad company have raised troubling questions about privatization. This book addresses one of the most vexing of these: how can government fairly and effectively regulate "natural monopolies"--those infrastructure and utility services whose technologies make competition impractical? Rather than sticking to economics, José Gómez-Ibáñez draws on history, politics, and a wealth of examples to provide a road map for various approaches to regulation. He makes a strong case for favoring market-oriented and contractual approaches--including private contracts between infrastructure providers and customers as well as concession contracts with the government acting as an intermediary--over those that grant government regulators substantial discretion. Contracts can provide stronger protection for infrastructure customers and suppliers--and greater opportunities to tailor services to their mutual advantage. In some cases, however, the requirements of the firms and their customers are too unpredictable for contracts to work, and alternative schemes may be needed. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments 1. Monopoly as a Contracting Problem 2. The Choice of Regulatory Strategy Part I. Regulatory Politics and Dynamics 3. The Behavior of Regulatory Agencies 4. Capture and Instability: Sri Lankas Buses and U.S. Telephones 5. Incompleteness and Its Consequences: Argentinas Railroads 6. Forestalling Expropriation: Electricity in the Americas Part II. Contract versus Discretionary Regulation 7. The Evolution of Concession Contracts: Municipal Franchises in North America 8. The Rediscovery of Private Contracts: U.S. Railroad and Airline Deregulation--with John R. Meyer 9. Price-Cap Regulation: The British Water Industry Part III. Vertical Unbundling and Regulation 10. The Trade-off in Unbundling: Competition versus Coordination 11. Regulating Coordination: British Railroads 12. Designing Capacity Markets: Electricity in Argentina--with Martín Rodríguez-Pardina 13. The Prospects for Unbundling 14. The Future of Regulation Notes Index Regulating Infrastructure: Monopoly, Contracts and Discretion is a book that merges the modern economics of the firm with traditional regulatory concerns in an original and provocative way. It is a valuable contribution to the literature that should be read by anyone concerned with redefining regulation for the new Century.--Michael E. Levine, Yale Law School

AbstractModern warfare is often indirect: rebel groups are normally too weak to fight the state's army in an open conflict, while the main problem of the government is to find the hideout of the rebels or identify their supporters. In this paper, I argue that if communication channels like free media are missing, rebel groups choose to attack the energy infrastructure. Empirical evidence reveals that countries with freer media experience less attacks against their energy infrastructure.

The construction of American infrastructure after 1900 is illustrative of the effects that social reform and turn of the century technology had on urban planning. The rapid growth of the American automobile market, the use of urban infrastructure as means for government social control and surveillance, as well as the racism implicit in transit development all heavily inform the built environment during this time. Looking back as far as Baron Haussmann's renovation of Paris in the mid-1800s, this thesis analyzes the ways that public infrastructure ties into aspects of social control. Through three case studies of New York's Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Chicago Transit Authority's 95th/Dan Ryan train terminal, and The University of Illinois at Chicago's former elevated walkways, I look at the different ways that movement is dictated within the built environment. This paper uses texts from the fields of history, architectural history, public policy, economics, and transit studies to understand both the common threads between the three public works chosen as well as the differing ways that these spaces affect the urban landscape.