Infrastructure Forum

As the global context of infrastructure financing evolves, how to advance the policy issues most important to ensuring resilient infrastructure can be financed, in both developed and emerging markets, is a critical consideration. With the fiscal space for infrastructure narrowing, it is essential that resilience remains a key policy issue and the momentum to finance is maintained and supported by good governance of infrastructure. The current context requires a revisit of how governance can support financing to be better secured for the various infrastructure resilience needs. Technological advances also impact how resilience of infrastructure needs to be addressed both in terms of development and operation to secure the necessary infrastructure. This session will discuss how policy issues can be advanced to ensure greater infrastructure financing towards resilience with better public investment management and private capital mobilisation. The session will also discuss how these issues are being confronted in different countries, including the reforms countries make to strengthen infrastructure resilience through governance as well as innovative financial instruments.

Countries that experience both real and perceived political risk can experience difficulty in accessing financing, both public and private. To address this, political risk insurance can enable financing to overcome key barriers that can inhibit financing opportunities for infrastructure. This is particularly important in conflict situations when political risk is elevated to war risk; whether a country is directly involved or not, geographical proximity or supply-chain network can also expose countries to political risk if investors deem the effects of a conflict could spill over. This session will discuss the features of political risk insurance from the supply- and demand-side, with a particular focus on high political risk that can hamper investment efforts despite bankable infrastructure projects being available. The challenges of accessing political risk insurance will be discussed with input from both the public and private sector providers, as well as countries that could benefit from such financial instruments.

Many countries face challenges delivering infrastructure that responds to the needs of growing populations and emerging risks while operating within tight fiscal constraints. This requires countries to maximise achieving value for money, so investment programmes are resilient to shock events, such as fiscal shocks. In response, several countries have been strengthening how they plan, prioritise, fund, monitor and report on public investments. This involves centres of government adopting more strategic oversight of public investment decisions across government, and putting in place more consistent, rigorous rules for how ministries select and manage infrastructure. This session will illustrate case studies from several countries where reforms have recently been made, with lessons also from countries with longer-standing, high maturity public investment settings.

Subnational governments carry out over 55% of public investment in the OECD and are directly responsible for building and maintaining a significant proportion of government infrastructure, including that related to the energy and digital transitions. However, previous episodes of fiscal consolidation and associated cuts in capital transfers, as well as economic shocks, have demonstrated that that subnational governments tend to cut investment first. This is notably due to their lower tax autonomy and more limited access to borrowing compared to central governments. This leaves them with few options other than postponing or cancelling investment. In addition, disparities across jurisdictions exacerbate the problem, with fiscally stronger regions and cities being better able to raise revenues and sustain investment, while many smaller and poorer ones struggle to maintain basic capital spending. This session will examine how existing funding and financing frameworks shape the ability of regions and cities to maintain investment during periods of fiscal stress and how resilient subnational investment is responding to shocks across territories, drawing on recent OECD work on subnational fiscal frameworks and the multi-level governance of public investment.

Digital infrastructure — broadband access networks, fibre backhaul, submarine cables, Internet Exchange Points, data centres, content delivery networks, cloud infrastructure, and compute capacity (including semiconductors) — is the foundation for all transformative digital technologies, underpinning productivity growth, innovation and business competitiveness, and, critically, artificial intelligence. This session will explore the critical role of resilient communication networks in a world increasingly dependent on connectivity, and the challenges policymakers face in protecting networks from system failures, malicious actions, and natural disasters. It will also raise issues related to bottlenecks to the investments needed to ensure resilient communication networks of the future.

In 2023, during India’s G20 Presidency, the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC) was launched as a trade initiative encompassing multimodal transport, energy connectivity, and digital infrastructure. Due to its potential to contribute to supply chain security, regional economic integration, local value addition, and long-distance trade between India and Europe, it has emerged as a promising alternative to existing trans-continental trade routes. The evolving geopolitical context in the Middle East has further increased its momentum, transforming IMEC from a linear route into a network of corridors, thus strengthening and dispersing its potential economic and security benefits. The OECD report “Enhancing connectivity: the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC)” offers a series of technical analyses based on the OECD Corridors’ Connectivity Scoreboard, which measures hard and soft connectivity through internationally comparable data, with in-depth analysis of transport infrastructure and trade facilitation along the corridor. The aim is to comprehend IMEC’s opportunities and challenges, support informed decision-making, strengthen trust and partnerships, and promote co-ordinated approach to the future development of IMEC.

Regional economic corridors can strengthen economic resilience, competitiveness and growth by creating faster, more reliable and diversified connections between markets. Their potential, however, depends not only on infrastructure projects. Effective corridors require integrated multimodal transport, but also energy, digital and logistics networks, underpinned by enabling policy and regulatory frameworks that facilitate cross-border trade and translate improved connectivity into wider economic opportunities. The OECD developed the Corridors’ Connectivity Scoreboard, an indicator-based tool measuring efficiency and completeness of multi-modal transport along a corridor (hard connectivity) and assessing regulatory convergence and discrepancy (soft connectivity), with a view to inform policy makers, support targeted reforms and strengthen co-ordination across countries and partners to maximise the economic benefits of corridors. The Scoreboard is being applied to a number of corridors, and most recently to the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC). With a focus on IMEC, this session will explore how to operationalise efficient corridors and maximise their impact. Discussions will consider the essential infrastructure and investment requirements across corridors, and how greater multimodality and interoperability can support seamless connectivity. The session will also examine how stronger cross-border co-operation and co-ordination across stakeholders can support efficient implementation, enabling corridor development to deliver more resilient and sustainable growth.

Resilience sits at the centre of the defining challenges facing Ukraine’s infrastructure: sustaining essential services under attack, restoring connectivity for trade and logistics, strengthening resilience to future shocks, and supporting the long-term trajectory towards deeper European integration. Even as the country endures the human, economic and institutional pressures generated by Russia’s full-scale invasion, it continues to advance essential reforms to strengthen its infrastructure governance and financing architecture and build the foundations for a resilient and modern economy. This session will bring together a variety of perspectives on the challenges that are testing the resilience of Ukraine’s infrastructure and some of the immediate and medium-term responses that public entities, the private sector and international partners are supporting in a context of war.

At a time when many countries are increasing expenditure on national defense, investments in resilience of critical infrastructure can produce strategic synergies between the civil and defense sectors. This session will discuss dual benefits of increasing critical infrastructure resilience in terms of business continuity and national preparedness. There is also an increasing interest in ensuring the economic security of infrastructure, and how FDI screening can contribute to this. The session will examine how some countries are addressing it to meet their national interests. Speakers will highlight the success factors in achieving such synergies, including effective coordination between line ministries, regulators and infrastructure operators, as well as cooperation in managing hazards and threats that could produce cascading effects across different infrastructure systems.

Infrastructure decisions made today lock in emissions, resilience, and social outcomes for decades. In Central Asia, there is a particularly pressing need for infrastructure investment due to ageing energy assets, significant gaps in trade and transport infrastructure and mounting demands due to demographic and economic dynamics. This session draws on ongoing work on sustainable infrastructure in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan under the OECD's Sustainable Infrastructure Programme in Asia (SIPA). A brief scene-setting presentation will draw key messages from the 2026 SIPA synthesis report, Accelerating Sustainable Infrastructure Investments, and panel discussions with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and SIPA's donor Germany will explore how governments can enable sustainable infrastructure development: from long-term strategic planning and sectoral policy design, to integrated cost-benefit and asset-level assessments, to mobilising sustainable finance and private investment. The discussion will highlight practical tools and peer-learning approaches that helped translate climate commitments (including NDCs, long-term low-emission development strategies and green bonds) into bankable, resilient project pipelines, and consider what these lessons offer other regions confronting similar infrastructure and climate financing challenges.

The business case for investments in resilience is becoming clearer with increased understanding of how they contribute to avoided losses, reduced business interruptions, better operating performance, more revenue stability and ultimately better long-term asset value. As a consequence, resilient infrastructure assets are increasingly a precondition for investors seeking to future-proof their portfolios against extreme weather events and other disasters. Delivering infrastructure that remains safe, functional and economically viable over its full lifecycle requires resilience to be considered from project preparation and procurement through design, delivery, operation and maintenance. The Blue Dot Network certification provides a framework for embedding resilience at every stage of the infrastructure life cycle that can support project developers in creating robust projects, while assisting investors in identifying resilient assets. The session will consider a variety of complementary tools, methodologies and frameworks that can inform more systematic and verifiable approaches to mainstreaming resilience across the infrastructure lifecycle, as well as provide investors with the necessary data to identity assets with strong resilience features, and the evidence to make the case for investment in resilience.

With extreme weather events and natural disasters becoming more frequent and severe, and with poorest countries and people often bearing the greatest toll, rebuilding infrastructure has become a strategic development challenge. Recovery decisions made in the aftermath of a disaster can either lock countries into future vulnerabilities or create a pathway towards more resilient, sustainable and competitive economies. Building on the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, which calls for Building Back Better as a core priority for recovery, and on the OECD Prevent-React-Rebuild (PRR) Framework for infrastructure resilience, rebuilding should be viewed as an opportunity not simply to restore damaged assets, but to address structural weaknesses, reduce future risks and accelerate long-term development. This session draws on the findings of the OECD-World Bank Compendium of Good Practices on Quality Infrastructure 2026: Rebuilding for the Future. It explores global experiences and identify practical lessons from countries that have successfully transformed post-disaster reconstruction into an investment in resilience. It also discusses emerging challenges in rebuilding for resilience in key competitiveness-related infrastructure projects including economic development corridors. It will provide a platform for governments, development finance institutions, international organisations and the private sector to exchange experiences, discuss financing and institutional innovations, and identify new opportunities for international cooperation.