The financialisation of infrastructure : the role of categorisation and property relations

The paper explores the links between the tolling of flows through infrastructure passageways and the nature of financial securities that capture the earnings from these flows. At the heart of this relationship is a distinctive class of property rights that enable the traversal of otherwise discrete private property holdings. The paper tracks the evolution of infrastructure as a category and of its property rights to reveal the peculiar nature of infrastructure privatisation. Important is the role of the state, the only institution capable of creating the property and regulatory conditions for an increasingly private sphere of economic activity.