4 Infrastructure and the international governance of economic development , 1950 – 1965

Only in the context of international debate about economic development after Second World War did the term infrastructure become a label for the technical-political systems required for growth and modernity. This chapter traces the intellectual and institutional roots of the category of infrastructure in the development debates of the 1950s: its affinity with the earlier idea of social overhead capital and its mobilization in the conflict between the United Nations and the World Bank surrounding the financing of development investment. I argue that debates about development aid shifted attention from an economic definition of infrastructure towards one framed more in terms of general prerequisites. Analyzing this expansive category of infrastructure, which remains largely in place today, gives insight into the territoriality of the post-colonial world and challenges exclusively physical or engineering-based ideas of infrastructure.