Customer Stewardship: Infrastructure’s missing link

The quality of a community’s assets and services
– schools, hospitals, roads, water, power and
waste – together have a profound impact on lifedefining decisions: where we live, what jobs we
do and how we connect with our community and
friends. Infrastructure now has an even bigger role
in shaping the future quality of life for our children
and grandchildren.

Customer stewardship in infrastructure challenges
all stakeholders to much broader thinking and to
finding more enduring answers to our economic
problems (Chapter 2). This paper argues these
answers are more likely to be found in the fertile
soil of building relationships, which reinforce
growth through reciprocity and are sustained with a
commitment to participation first.

No jurisdiction should tolerate an absence of
customer stewardship from its infrastructure. The
challenge of implementing it is neither technical
nor engineered in its nature. Instead, it demands
cultural change powered by governance reform
where governments enable owners and operators to
interact with customers to inform decisions about
the types of services they need and prefer.