Sovereign investors as agents of institutional change
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Every year there is a gap of USD1 trillion between investments made into infrastructure and the amount needed to achieve global access to water, energy, transportation and waste treatment, while mitigating global CO2 emissions. Debt-ridden, governments alone can't fill this gap. Private investors have increased their investments, but often shy away from projects that could have the most impact on development. However, new types of organizations, sovereign investors, could help governments plan and finance infrastructure for long-term development, while carving out attractive financial opportunities for private investors. Sovereign investors are government-owned investment management companies who are increasingly investing both for national development and financial returns. Chapter 2 of this thesis brings the first large-scale qualitative study of sovereign investors' identities and investment strategies, using computer-assisted text analysis on 57 sovereign investors' annual reports. It shows that most sovereign investors boast development as their mission and invest in the real economy. Investing solely for financial returns on financial markets is losing steam among these investors and characterizes primarily investors from OECD countries. Theoretically, this chapter gives an example of "path generation" as an alternative to "globalization" and "path dependency", in which signs of compliance with different institutional orders are combined. Chapter 3 gives a detailed example of how a sovereign investor attracted USD50 bn over 10 years and transformed an agricultural region into an urban area with six vibrant industrial clusters. By combining a network analysis of the co-investments in the region with interviews of the main types of actors, it shows how a sovereign investor crafted its network to allow for both innovation and stability, two ingredients necessary for economic development. Theoretically, the chapter matches a set of network centrality measures with strategies for actors to manage divergent expectations from multiple actors. Chapter 4 builds on the idea that organizations at arm's length from governments can bring the innovation necessary to face "grand challenges" such as the infrastructure gap. Through a comparative case study of four independent infrastructure agencies in Australia, it shows how units that builds legitimacy towards several government actors can convince government actors to adopt innovations, and keep the cognitive distance that enables them to innovate. However, maintaining legitimacy towards several actors is hard to sustain over the long run, which explains why many units become cognitively close to other government actors and revert to incremental instead of radical innovation over time
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Nowacki, Caroline Emmanuelle |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Levitt, Raymond E |
| Thesis advisor | Levitt, Raymond E |
| Thesis advisor | Barnett, William P |
| Thesis advisor | Monk, Ashby H. B. (Ashby Henry Benning), 1976- |
| Degree committee member | Barnett, William P |
| Degree committee member | Monk, Ashby H. B. (Ashby Henry Benning), 1976- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Civil & Environmental Engineering Department. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Caroline E. Nowacki |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Caroline Emmanuelle Nowacki
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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