This paper studies the politics surrounding the implementation of Pakistan’s first mass transit project, the Lahore Bus Rapid Transit corridor completed in 2013, to interrogate the role that infrastructure mega-projects hold in highly factional and democratising polities of the global South. Drawing on the Lahore BRT as a case study, this paper posits that infrastructure development is increasingly interwoven with conceptions of political legitimacy and “modernising” governance, especially under conditions of nascent democratic competition. We argue that democratisation-led transformations in the political-institutional context of state power has helped fashion new roles for mega-projects, which partly explains why state power is mobilised for projects that had been ignored for several decades. Finally, this paper cautions that this new role for infrastructure, while marking a departure from previous patterns, can simultaneously constrain the possibilities for sustainable interventions going forward.
CITATION STYLE
Sajjad, F., & Javed, U. (2022). Democracy, Legitimacy, and Mega-Project Politics: The Evolution of Lahore’s First BRT Corridor. Antipode, 54(5), 1497–1518. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12829
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