Not long ago, few governments or companies would dream of building large-scale infrastructure in another country. It was seen as being too risky and the timeline for returns too long-term. But in the relative global calm and heightened interconnectivity of the early 21st century, the building of bridges, roads, and even entire cities on foreign soil has become standard operating procedure for many powerful nations and big engineering firms, as the international infrastructure development scene crescendos to a proverbial free-for-all.
China is building new cities in Georgia, Egypt, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka; a German company built an entirely new town in China; an American company built a state of the art new city from scratch in South Korea; a developer from Abu Dhabi is building a new district in Belgrade; Japan is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into rail lines, metro systems, bridges, and ports in places like India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Cambodia. What’s more, as China advances across Asia and Africa with its Belt and Road initiative, a competitive dynamic has been established as other regional powers appear to be scurrying to land as many big ticket international infrastructure projects as they can — before China swipes them all up.
But what happens when foreign developers don’t properly take the local governmental processes, culture, business ecosystem, consumer market, or even physical terrain into account? What happens when big dreams and solid plans are sabotaged by local competitors? What happens when governments change and the new bosses have little interest in continuing the projects of their predecessors? These questions are not rhetorical; they are painfully being answered with experience all over the emerging markets of the world today.
Hambantota
Wade Shepard
Land in Hambantota. This area is mostly rural, with very little development.
Billions of dollars worth of Chinese money was pumped into building a new deep sea port, an international airport, a conference center, a stadium, and new highways in a remote area in the south of Sri Lanka. The plan was to construct an entirely new urban center that would complement Colombo and economically invigorate an underdeveloped part of the country. Ideally, the endeavor would have helped Sri Lanka…