A theory of infrastructure provision

This paper presents a survey of research in the area of infrastructure provision. A body of research from regional development, development economics, and regional systems of innovation has embraced questions of regional innovation as a topic of study. This literature, as of yet, has not examined the character of infrastructure provisioning, preferring instead to focus on the social and economic effects of provided infrastructure. This paper adopts a broad, qualitative framework from cooperative game theory to synthesize the available literature. Objects of interest are the actors, coalitions, and resulting distribution of value which are achieved by infrastructure provision. Like previous authors we suggest that the quality of provided infrastructure depends strongly on the character of these negotiated arrangements, called by some ¿infrastructure governance¿.