Trevino Lozano, Laura and Martin-Ortega, Olga ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1779-0120 (2023) Sustainable public procurement of infrastructure and human rights: linkages and gaps. In: Martin-Ortega, Olga ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1779-0120 and Trevino Lozano, Laura, (eds.) Sustainable Public Procurement of Infrastructure and Human Rights. Beyond Building Green. Law 2023 . Edward Elgar, Cheltenham and Masachussetts, pp. 2-27. ISBN 978-1802205503; 978-1802205510 (doi:10.4337/9781802205510.00011)

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Abstract

The need for processes to develop infrastructure and its purposes is approached differently by different disciplines. Among the most comprehensive of such definitions understands infrastructure as ‘all physical assets, equipment and facilities of interrelated systems and their necessary service providers offering related commodities and services’ to a wide public, with the objective of enabling, supporting or improving people’s living conditions in a given society. This implies that the welfare of individuals is at the core of infrastructure; the main reason that justifies its existence.
Recently, sustainability has become part of the concept of infrastructure,
leading to the notion of sustainable infrastructure. Sustainable infrastructure, as we use it in this book, is infrastructure ‘planned, designed, constructed, operated and decommissioned in a manner that ensures economic and financial, social, environmental (including climate resilience) and institutional sustainability over the entire life cycle of the project’. Other concepts that refer to specific aspects of sustainable infrastructure, such as natural infrastructure, have emerged, which, while not the main focus of this book, challenge the need to build in order to deliver on infrastructure services and pose the alternative of active management of natural lands and open spaces networks to obtain
benefits for human populations and the environment.
Typically, infrastructure is classified either as economic or social. Economic infrastructure generally refers to systems that underpin the economy, including in the transport and communications sector, such as roads, airports, ports and railways; in the energy sector, such as windfarms, oil and gas networks or dams; and in water and sanitation, such as water supply and waste disposal. In contrast, social infrastructure is often referred to as those systems on which the well-being of societies depends: in the education sector, such as schools and libraries; in healthcare, such as hospitals and other health facilities. Other infra-
structure often classified as social are prisons, the security industry, museums, parks and stadiums and culture and entertainment sector infrastructure. This book analyses the interlinkages and gaps between sustainable public procurement (SPP) of infrastructure and human rights through the case studies of hospitals and infrastructure for mega-sporting events, focused mostly on stadium building. When classifying the latter, however, we are proposing to consider stadiums and other facilities developed in the context of mega-sporting events as a separate classification from social infrastructure. This is because of the specific context in which they are developed, which features artificial deadlines and direct intervention from authorities other than the commissioning public, such as the sporting body of the sport in question, and which involves issues other than public service, such as reputation on the global stage. But in particular, they are different from other social infrastructure projects due to their high developmental impacts and massive public investment, by which countries are bound for decades in order to deliver just a few weeks of activity, as the case studies in Part III demonstrate.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	public procurement; sustainability; infrastructure; human rights
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) K Law > K Law (General)
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > School of Law & Criminology (LAC)
Related URLs:	Publisher
Last Modified:	24 Nov 2023 11:57
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/39080

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