Infrastructures are central to governments’ responses to challenges such as climate change, digital transformation, economic recovery, and geopolitical instability. Across transport, energy, telecommunications, digital technology, and urban development, infrastructure policies entail long-term, large-scale interventions that shape societal transformations. Their design and development involve policy processes characterized by complexity, uncertainty, conflict, and competing visions of the future.
This panel invites theoretical and empirical contributions examining infrastructure policy design through the interplay of institutions, narratives, and actor networks. It approaches infrastructures as a policy domain in which institutional configurations shape opportunities and constraints, heterogeneous actors negotiate interests and coordinate action, and narratives influence how problems, solutions, costs, benefits, and desired futures are interpreted and contested. Particular attention is given to how these dimensions interact over time and shape the capacity to design and sustain long-term policy interventions.
The panel welcomes contributions addressing questions such as: How do institutional arrangements and multilevel governance structures shape infrastructure policy design? How do networks of public, private, and societal actors coordinate, compete, and build coalitions around infrastructure choices? How are narratives, frames, and discursive practices used to justify or challenge projects and policy trajectories? How do institutional configurations and actor networks affect anticipatory capacity and the integration of long-term thinking into infrastructure policy? How do complexity, uncertainty, conflict, and critical events reshape infrastructure policies over time?
Contributions may draw on different theoretical perspectives from public policy and public administration, including policy process theories, institutional approaches, interpretive and narrative perspectives, governance theories, and approaches to anticipatory governance. The panel welcomes diverse methodological approaches, including single-case and small-N comparative case studies, as well as large-N studies. Studies focusing on the European context are particularly welcome, while the panel is also open to research on other geographical contexts.
