Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2011), pp. 391–415 doi:10.1093/ojls/gqr005 Published Advance Access March 31, 2011 Financing as Governance FLEUR JOHNS* Abstract—Built environments, and social and legal interactions through them, are powerfully shaped by the arrangements by which their making and remaking are financed. There is a rich literature analysing shifts towards private and/or offshore financing of infrastructure in broad terms and their implications for governmental accountability and so-called public interest values. At the level of mundane regulatory decision and technique, however, the ways in which governance may be affected by such financing arrangements have not been well mapped. The article considers some governance implications of the practice of funding urban infrastructure projects by recourse to global financial markets. It focuses, in particular, upon how regulatory decision-making may be shaped by technical practices of financial deal-making, financial modelling and related re-configurations of institutional or jurisdictional space. These implications are explored by reference to some recent examples of urban toll-road financing in Sydney, Australia and decision-making and analysis surrounding those examples. As such, it joins with other recent scholarship in probing political dimensions of technical forms of knowledge and practice that have frequently fallen between the cracks of legal scholarship’s interdisciplinary inquiries to date. Keywords: governance, regulation, financing, public/private partnerships, urban infrastructure, legal theory and legal technique 1. Introduction What is special about the language of quantity? So Theodore Porter famously asked in his book Trust in Numbers. 1 Numbers, Porter went on to show, have * Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney Faculty of Law and Co-Director, Sydney Centre for International Law. E-mail: fleur.johns@sydney.edu.au. I am deeply grateful to Pat O’Malley for the workshop and conference invitation that prompted the development of this article, and to Nicholas Blomley, Hilary Charlesworth, Jeremy Farrell, Mariana Valverde, Katharine Young and audience members at the panel on ‘Urban Governance Beneath the Law’ held at the Law & Society Conference in Chicago in May 2010 and at a seminar at the Regulatory Institutions Network, Australian National University, Canberra, in September 2010, for their feedback on the earlier papers out of which this article was developed. I would also like to thank Sadhana Abayasekara and Surya Gopalan for research assistance in this article’s preparation and Selene Brett for discussion surrounding its development. In addition, I am grateful to the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies’ two anonymous referees for their insightful and constructive feedback on an earlier version of this article. Finally, I acknowledge the support of the University of Sydney Brown Fellowship, allowing me research time to complete this article. 1 T Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton University Press, New Jersey 1996) ix. ß The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com at University of Sydney on July 6, 2011 ojls.oxfordjournals.org Downloaded from