INTRODUCTION – THE CHALLENGES AHEAD

This report has established that the role which infrastructural provision must play in the future requires a new perspective which recognises their core, strategic role in facilitating wider economic and societal change. Among the future challenges that require vast investments are the transition to sustainable mobility, a knowledge-based economy as well as a low-carbon economy – all of the revised Lisbon agenda goals. These goals show that the infrastructures involved are not just important for the delivery of services such as gas, electricity, drinking water, transport or electronic communications. Infrastructures are increasingly pivotal for facilitating change and as such, in realising general, long-term collective public values for society at large. It follows that government strategy must now devote renewed attention to securing a facilitating, strategic role for infrastructures and recognise that investing in infrastructures is absolutely vital for achieving long-term public values.

This report, in this perspective, has also identified challenges and potential risks that are at least in part, intrinsic to the process of regime change examined in previous chapters. Specifically, as chapters 1 and 2 have emphasised, the essential focus of regime change has been i) on short-term and static efficiencies and ii) on the products and services delivered over the infrastructures, and not the infrastructures themselves. But in order to maintain a high quality of service delivery and, at the same time, meet these new challenges, a renewed focus on the role of infrastructures in not only serving consumer interests but also in meeting longerterm societal values including sustainability, mobility and innovation, is imperative. The enormous costs as well as the increasing urgency for large-scale investments to accomplish this process cannot be underestimated (for example, the iea estimates for energy transport networks alone this is in the region of € 200 billion). However, substantial investments in the trans-European infrastructures, that provide the true backbone for Europe's single market in transport, electronic communications and energy supply, figure high on the EU policy agenda. The challenges ahead, especially in climate change, require a transition of a magnitude that has brought EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs to speak of a ‘Third industrial revolution’.