Infrastructure Projects and Long-Term Social Transformations

Large-scale infrastructure and megaprojects have often been analysed in terms of their adverse social and environmental impacts, particularly displacement and resettlement, environmental conflicts, social inequalities, socio-political divisions, and community resistance. Such studies have generated important insights into long-term processes of impoverishment, livelihood restoration, social adaptation, and changing state–society relations. Yet the temporal dynamics of social transformation are often more complex than a unidirectional process through which projects reshape societies.

While infrastructure projects may generate profound social transformations, projects themselves may also be reshaped by broader political, social, environmental, and technological transformations. Changing development priorities, governance arrangements, public expectations, environmental concerns, and future imaginaries may alter the trajectories of infrastructure projects themselves. Projects may be delayed, suspended, revived, redesigned, contested, or re-legitimised under changing historical conditions.

This session examines infrastructure projects as long-term social phenomena embedded within wider processes of social transformation. We are particularly interested in how they become sites through which social transformation is negotiated, contested, interrupted, and reconfigured, and in how project trajectories evolve through shifting political, institutional, and societal contexts.

We welcome empirical and comparative contributions from different regions and historical contexts. Contributions may address dams, high-speed railways, airports, ports, nuclear power projects, water transfer schemes, urban redevelopment projects, and other forms of infrastructure. By bringing together diverse cases and perspectives, this session aims to advance sociological understanding of how infrastructure projects and social transformations shape one another over time.