The four articles in this Issue, at first sight very varied in content, have one broad theme in common: the complexity and scale of megaproject development linked to sustainable development when one probes beneath the goals, intentions, international agreements, policy statements and theories of sustainability. If the goals and targets are to be met, the world needs this level of deep and detailed investigation.
In Part 1, the first article by Ademola Ojo invites us to think about sustainable development from the perspective of a developing country, Nigeria. Critically important are those physical infrastructures which we take for granted in the rich countries of the economically developed world: infrastructures providing energy, housing, transport, water and sanitation, information and communications. In the developing world some or all of these infrastructures are often of poor standard or insufficient to lift socio-economic growth, which, in turn, is necessary to ‘foster local inclusiveness, economic progress and environmental friendliness’.
In this article, the author examines the relative influence of electric power supply and transport infrastructures on sustainable economic development in Nigeria. Both kinds of infrastructures have traditionally been understood to be necessary for ‘growth’, but not necessarily growth that respects the natural environment or enhances social fairness and safety. Nevertheless, as Ojo points out, Nigeria is extremely deficient in the basic road network (only 16% of roads are paved) and electricity supply (20 million households without electricity, 83.9 million people unconnected to the national grid). Infrastructure investment in both these domains is thus an urgent necessity for the country.
Following a review of the literature of both ‘socio-economic development’ per se and ‘sustainable development’, the author examines the implementation of both in Nigeria. This examination is followed by reporting of the author’s comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of transport infrastructure as against electricity infrastructure for sustainable economic development. The comparison is carried out with the aid of a series of econometric models. The study concludes that while electric power supply is closely associated with sustainable economic development, ‘it does not serve as a catalyst’ for such development understood as embodying ‘local inclusiveness, economic progress and environmental friendliness’. This paper concludes with recommendations to the Nigerian government to invest in both infrastructure for electricity supply and improvement of the nation’s transport infrastructure.
The second article by Maria del Mar Rubio Varas addresses a very different kind of problem but one nonetheless also related to issues of electricity supply: the time scale of planning and construction of nuclear power plants and the changing economic and social context within which such work takes place. Each nuclear plant is a megaproject because of its scale and complexity, huge investment and long-lasting impact on the economy, environment and society. The essay takes to task the ‘iron triangle’ approach to assessing nuclear megaproject performance. She asks whether nuclear power plants ‘are expected to be consistently and pathologically overscheduled and overbudget independently of when and where the project was built’. The question is addressed using the tools of economic history by examining the known pitfalls of nuclear power plant development in the historical context.
The first section of the article argues that, if time from inception to completion is ‘money’, as is well known, some ‘times’ (at some periods) are more expensive than others. Evaluation against ‘iron triangle’ criteria – projected cost, timetable to completion and predefined project prescriptions – is not feasible due to lack of data for the 600 commercial reactors built during the last seventy years. Moreover, the financing costs and interest accumulating during the construction period (the most important costs of nuclear plant construction), would effectively be excluded by the typical ‘iron triangle’ methodology. The final viability of the project depends on the nature of debt financing over the long period of construction and the time horizon over which the project is developed. The author finds that for the reactors studied, ‘the risk of non-viability varied across location and decades’.
The second section of the article examines completion times of nuclear projects through history. The time between initiation of construction activities and the start of commercial operation (the lead time) is the most expensive item in the cost of the project. Such lead times, it is argued, are the only observable, systematic and comparable metric for comparison of nuclear projects’ performance. Lead times have been the object of study. However, the author points out, the temporal context – ‘when’ the project was under construction – is not usually considered. Precision about the context is important ‘because the causes behind abnormally long lead times are heterogeneous both across time and space’.
The final section of this paper examines the nineteen lengthiest nuclear projects ever built and develops an understanding of the context within which these projects took place. The author finds that a number of key contextual politico-economic variables were in play during the lead time of these projects: the period of economic malaise in Britain in the 1970s, the economic trauma in Latin America with the end of military dictatorships and the unstable period of democratization in the region, the Iranian revolution, the Three Mile Island incident in the USA, the Chernobyl incident in 1986, and the economic crisis in Russia and associated states following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The author concludes that, ‘the plants that have taken the longest to be built in history would not have been done faster no matter how much operational control had been exercised over the project, simply because the contextual/historical circumstances were impossible to forecast’. It is a feature of megaprojects with long lead times that they will be subject to unpredictable geo-political risks and even micro-level changes at the sub-national and even local level and that this needs to be acknowledged.
In the first article of Part 2, Thomas Longden’s review of the transformation of Australia’s electricity supply concerns the polar opposite of the kind of infrastructural issues facing nuclear power megaprojects. The mega infrastructure in question is the Australian electricity grid. The transformation is the result of a myriad of low risk, short term, solar, wind and battery, dispersed micro-changes by individuals, firms and some state governments, partially co-ordinated (in the eastern half of Australia) by the market and its energy regulator. Nevertheless, the sum total of these micro changes adds up to considerable issues for the grid.
It is important here to first outline the recent institutional history of the system. Up to 1999 all of Australia’s electricity was generated, distributed and supplied by public sector statutory corporations in each state. In this system there was some exchange of power supply between Victoria (and Tasmania), New South Wales and South Australia, but there was no national electricity grid. Electricity generation, supply and retailing systems were privatised in the states of Victoria and South Australia between 1999 and 2000, and partially privatised in New South Wales after 2015. The state of Queensland privatised the retail sector while maintaining public ownership of the network and some generators. In Western Australia energy generators remain as publicly owned statutory corporations. In Tasmania electricity is generated by state owned hydro-power facilities.
So today Australia has a hybrid public-private system. The system in the Eastern states is co-ordinated by an ‘energy market’ regulated centrally by the Australian Energy Market Operator which develops an Integrated System Plan (ISP) updated every two years to provide advice on the development of the transmission grid. The disruption that has occurred is the invasion of the traditional infrastructure (large centralised, mostly coal-fired power stations distributing electricity via sprawling inefficient high-tension power lines) by small scale renewables providing efficient on-site electricity. Longden’s article discusses the 2018 and 2020 ISPs (of the Energy Market Operator) to ‘show how quickly the transition to renewables can change the energy system’. The article discusses projections of energy generation capacity and the proposals being made to manage the change in an environment of continuous reduction of the cost of distributed energy generation. International comparisons of the uptake of installed solar PV and onshore wind energy are made with nine other developed economies (in Europe, China and India). The capital cost trajectories of three main technologies (solar PV, battery and onshore wind) are modelled. The author notes that the first ISP projection of demand underestimated the uptake of solar PV.
The author sets out in detail three areas of proposed change to Australia’s energy system in response to the issues identified: firstly the near-term construction of transmission infrastructure to maximise the use of existing generation; secondly, developments in the medium term to enhance trade between regions, provide access to storage, and support extensive development of REZs [renewable energy zones]; and thirdly, longer-term developments to support REZs, system reliability and energy security’. Importantly, in doing so, the author shows how rapid change has occurred and is being managed in a country that ‘does not have a robust national decarbonisation policy but does have excellent wind and solar resources’. The establishment of ‘Renewable Energy Zones’ will speed the transition to renewables. Interconnectivity and storage are increasingly important in a grid with a large component of renewables. The rise of electric drive vehicles and small-scale batteries could further impact the grid and lead to reduced demand for large utility-scale resources.
The final article, by Ambaw Desalegn and Niguisse Solomon, returns us to the developing world, in this case Ethiopia. The authors address the concept of equity and ‘the importance of the government in establishing and maintaining fair and equitable methods of treating its citizens and regional states’. To be clear, therefore, ‘equity’ is understood as distributional fairness, for instance amongst social groups and regions. The authors consider the contribution of equitable infrastructure development to the goals of nation-building and state-building. Nation-building, in the authors’ definition, concerns the creation of a shared sense of identity or community within a federal nation made up of different ethnic groups and regions. State-building refers to building government capacity to carry out the functions of a modern state.
Ethiopia is a federal republic (declared in 1991) aiming to promote regional autonomy (‘self-rule’) amongst its nine regional states, and cooperation (‘shared-rule’) between ethnic groups and regions within the federation. The authors note the importance of: ‘interplay between the federal government and the states in terms of the designing of national policies and the decisions concerning the inter-regional allocation of federal spending on such policies that, in turn, affect the outcomes in states, and the entire state-and nation-building processes’. Citing the 2017 report of the National Planning Commission of Ethiopia, the authors describe the rapid and extensive progress in economic growth and infrastructure development over the years 1997–2017. Infrastructure development extends to building the nation’s road network, enhancing the generation and distribution of electric power, improving the telecommunications system, and building airports, industrial parks and educational facilities. Following a thorough exploration of the literature relating to equitable distribution of infrastructure in nation-building and state-building processes, this paper reports an analysis of data measuring key factors affecting the equity of government-funded infrastructure.
The data study employs two kinds of factor analysis: Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis. Factors examined relating to potential infrastructure inequity were lack of: equal opportunity, social/distributive justice, national and regional competitiveness, spatial intervention planning, and citizen/stakeholder public satisfaction. Factors relating to potentially inadequate nation-building process were lack of: rule of law, democratic public accountability, shared national identity and inclusive growth and sustainability. The study found that nation-building processes are highly influenced by the existence or lack of equity in distribution of costs and benefits of infrastructure development, and that inequity in the case of Ethiopia has directly affected the success of the nation-building process. Therefore, the authors conclude: ‘As a result, the federal government of Ethiopia should not only simply focus on getting institutional capacity for infrastructure development in the country; it would be more important for it to understand infrastructure governance and equity including regional governments’ needs’. The findings of this paper suggest that fair and just access to infrastructure is a significant element in nation-building processes. It also posited that state capacities are crucial to support the equitable allocation of public infrastructure investments and the nation-building processes in Ethiopia.
In conclusion, these four articles have a lot to say about the importance of context, both in terms of place and time. The first article adds specificity of place, Nigeria, to our understanding of the role of sustainability in development. The second article warns of the impact of changing economic and political circumstances on the time horizons necessary for the planning and development of nuclear megaprojects. The third article reminds us that change can occur quickly and from unexpected directions, forcing change (in this case) in the management of electricity grids. Micro-decisions (on solar, wind and batteries) collectively weigh on mega infrastructure (the energy grid). The fourth article addresses the importance of distributional fairness within a federal governmental system and an ethnically diverse society. Importantly all four articles relate mega infrastructure to sustainable development. The final article serves as a fitting coda to this issue of the journal reminding us that dealing fairly with infrastructure development is crucial to the process of nation building in developing countries as they confront issues such as climate change.
Melbourne Graduate School of Design, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
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