Infrastructure is vital for all citizens and businesses, providing essential services ranging from clean water to energy, roads and public buildings such as schools and hospitals. The governance of infrastructure supports all stages in the infrastructure lifecycle (from the identification of needs to decommission), underpinning delivery of those services. When governance arrangements fall short, this can lead to projects failing to meet their deadlines, budget, or service delivery objectives resulting in poor outcomes.

The “governance of infrastructure” is the processes, tools, and norms of interaction, decision making and monitoring used by government organisations and their counterparts to make infrastructure services available to the public and the public sector. Governments are often involved in the delivery of infrastructure services, from hospitals to utilities such as energy, water, communications and transport.

Economic regulators have been involved in administering regulation to public infrastructure for some time. This chapter explains sets out the rationale for investigating the role of economic regulators in the governance of infrastructure in light of the OECD’s work in exploring the governance of public infrastructure.

In order to better understand the role of economic regulators in the governance of infrastructure the survey sought information and on a number of aspects of economic regulators, the infrastructure industries they regulate, and the relationship between economic regulators and the infrastructure industries that they regulate. These included: roles and functions; infrastructure delivery mode and cost recovery; the involvement of economic regulators in the infrastructure life-cycle; infrastructure needs; how economic regulators use data in delivering their mandate; change and the involvement of economic regulators in the policy development process; and the challenges currently facing economic regulators.