Governing environmental and social impacts of infrastructure development is crucial to achieve sustainability and net zero transitions, especially in developing countries. However, for a very long time, standards and guidelines in this field remain scattered with different actors promoting various systems. A new trend has emerged over the last decade where ‘sustainable infrastructure’ has evolved from a scientific concept to a key goal for many investors. In this process, actors began to coordinate and develop common frameworks to define, identify and evaluate sustainable infrastructure projects. A recent milestone is the recent development of the FAST-Infra Label – a transnational meta-standard system to assess sustainable infrastructure projects. How transnational governance has been developed in this sphere filled with actors from both the public and private sectors? In this paper, we apply social network analysis to examine connections of the sources used by the FAST-Infra Label framework. Our analysis show that Global North actors and rules and norms developed by them have dominated this new governance field of sustainable infrastructure. Moreover, in the FAST-Infra Label’s network, public and private actors are closely connected in, but rules and norms developed by intergovernmental organisations remain in a central position to ensure the new standard’s credibility. By findings shed light on public-private governance interactions on sustainable infrastructure, our study makes novel contributions to the literature of transnational governance.
