Knowledge Capacity For Sustainable Infrastructure: A Bottom-up Approach

One of the biggest challenges for development finance practitioners is how to channel the vast pools of global savings to sustainable infrastructure investments. In this paper, we provide an overview of implementation challenges, and we discuss modalities for the development of public and private financing mechanisms for the selection of soft and hard infrastructure projects in the Global South. Our focus is on best practices and bottom- up solutions into government systems and programmes or into private sector offerings. We recommend the introduction of capacity building initiatives for scaling up sustainable infrastructure investment. Enhanced local investment capabilities can lower investment and implementation risks. This bottom-up approach allows investment priorities to be tested, adapted, and co-created at a small scale to evaluate their scale-up potential. Local governments gain a sense of the technical, financial, and economic parameters before entering the investment phase and local actors accumulate knowledge to develop and fine- tune investment projects to local conditions. In this scheme of things, space embedded institutions are enablers of local social and economic development.