Call for papers: Green Growth Knowledge Platform Annual Conference on sustainable infrastructure

The Fifth Green Growth Knowledge Platform (GGKP) Annual Conference will be hosted by the World Bank on the topic of sustainable infrastructure. The Conference will take place at the World Bank in Washington DC, USA, November 27 – 29, 2017. 

Infrastructure includes water supply and sanitation, flood protection, roads and transport, and energy and telecommunications. Infrastructure has major implications at the household level (health, education, and social mobility), at the firm level (productivity, industrial development), and at the global level (climate change, energy, forests, biodiversity, and pollution). Ensuring affordable and reliable access to infrastructure remains a major challenge in developing countries, but one that is further complicated by both a changing climate and changing climate policies.

The balancing act across the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainability is increasingly central to the infrastructure challenge. These issues can and have been addressed from different scientific perspectives, however despite a clear move of the academic community towards interdisciplinary projects, researchers working on specific aspects of the infrastructure agenda are not systematically interacting with each other.

This two day conference aims to take stock of recent advances and research challenges in green growth infrastructure and will feature some of the best researchers in the field, both from the academic world and from more policy-oriented backgrounds, in order to exchange key ideas and insights.

Call for papers

The scientific committee calls for contributions on any aspect of the infrastructure agenda, particularly for developing countries, with a focus on sustainability, being broadly defined to cover the economic, social, and environmental dimensions. An indicative list of topics that could be addressed by the conference, both at the theoretical and empirical level, includes:

  • Innovation in infrastructure delivery, both technological and organizational
  • Political economy, governance, and regulatory challenges and opportunities
  • Funding and financing challenges
  • Impact evaluation of infrastructure at the household, firm and landscape levels
  • Infrastructure, and social policies, including distributional aspects
  • Climate change and infrastructure (mitigation and adaptation aspects)
  • The role of natural/green infrastructure (nature-based solutions)
  • Urban infrastructure and path dependency
  • Systems effects of infrastructure investments

Deadline for Submissions

A preliminary version of the paper must be sent, in PDF format, to (sustainableinfra@worldbank.org) by 15 June 2017.

Extended abstracts will be considered but preference will be given to completed papers. The scientific committee will take decisions and authors will be informed by 31 July 2017.

Travel funding is available to support a limited number of developing country researchers.

Scientific Committee

  • Emmanuelle Auriol (Toulouse School of Economics)
  • Stefan Ambec (Toulouse School of Economics)
  • Juliano Assunção (Climate Policy Initiative, PUC-Rio)
  • Simon Buckle (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)
  • Ottmar Edenhofer (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research)
  • Paul Ekins (University College London)
  • Marianne Fay (World Bank)
  • Christian Gollier (Toulouse School of Economics)
  • Michael Grubb (University College London)
  • Jim Hall (University of Oxford)
  • Mushfiq Mobarak (Yale University)
  • Jaehak Oh (The Korea Transport Institute)
  • Mar Reguant (Northwestern University)
  • Keywan Riahi (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis)
  • Stéphane Straub (Toulouse School of Economics and World Bank)

Download a Word document of this call for papers here.

Photo: Asian Development Bank/Flickr