Abstract

Built environments, and social and legal interactions through them, are powerfully shaped by the arrangements by which their making and remaking are financed. There is a rich literature analysing shifts towards private and/or offshore financing of infrastructure in broad terms and their implications for governmental accountability and so-called public interest values. At the level of mundane regulatory decision and technique, however, the ways in which governance may be affected by such financing arrangements have not been well mapped. The article considers some governance implications of the practice of funding urban infrastructure projects by recourse to global financial markets. It focuses, in particular, upon how regulatory decision-making may be shaped by technical practices of financial deal-making, financial modelling and related re-configurations of institutional or jurisdictional space. These implications are explored by reference to some recent examples of urban toll-road financing in Sydney, Australia and decision-making and analysis surrounding those examples. As such, it joins with other recent scholarship in probing political dimensions of technical forms of knowledge and practice that have frequently fallen between the cracks of legal scholarship's interdisciplinary inquiries to date