Who Owns the Foundation? Infrastructure Orders and the Renegotiation of the Public Sphere

Infrastructures such as water or health care are complex networks characterized by the interlinking of objects, resources, services, and governance structures, each with layered rights of use, access, exploitation, and transfer. These complex chains can be organized in a proprietarily diverse manner along their nodes, with only certain points becoming contested or publicly debated.

Infrastructures remain a moving target. After decades of privatisation, commodification, and austerity-driven underfunding, new dynamics have emerged. These include successful (re)municipalisation at the urban level, the growing recognition of social and material infrastructure as fundamentally system-relevant since the pandemic, and evolving European and national legal norms to protect critical infrastructure amid shifting security concerns. While academic research has either focused on broad concepts of public services and infrastructures —such as ‘foundational economy’ and ‘infrastructure socialism’ — or on specific single cases, comparative analyses are rare. Even though understanding the interdependence of different infrastructure systems is crucial for a more conceptual approach to infrastructures of welfare, this perspective remains underexplored so far.

Against this backdrop and with a focus on the hidden layers of complex infrastructures, our project addresses two research questions:

 (1) Infrastructure discourses: How are infrastructures negotiated? What understanding of the state emerges, and how is ownership addressed? How are contributions from state, private, and civil society actors understood?
 (2) Infrastructure regimes: How are infrastructure regimes structured? What ownership forms emerge, and what role do non-proprietary solutions play? How do different systems interact, how are they prioritised, and how do they in turn shape societal ownership regimes?

The project will continue the research in Spain and the UK, adding Germany as a third case study. The empirical analysis will focus on six interconnected infrastructure areas: material infrastructures in water and energy, social infrastructures in childcare and elderly care, and hybrid infrastructures in health and nutrition, where material structures and social services intersect. Methodologically, the research will employ participant observation, focus group discussions, expert interviews, and document analysis.

The project contributes to exploring the diversity of ownership forms and their complex interconnections through the lens of infrastructures while also analyzing the significance of non-proprietary principles (e.g., social rights, commons, or open access). Of particular interest is the question of whether, after years of privatisation, deregulation and commodification, a new statism—driven by critique and crisis—can be observed.