Board readiness in an era of new infrastructure
Global Infrastructure Roundtable | Facilitated by Daniel Cole, BoardOutlook

Insights from Our Co-Host

"The infrastructure revolution underway is not a niche story for specialists. A $106 trillion capital requirement, an asset class accelerating from roads and pipelines into data centres, power networks, and digital infrastructure, will draw in investors, boards, and institutions well beyond those who have spent careers in the sector. I came to this session from software investing, and I was conscious of that gap. What I did not expect was how generously this group, chairs and directors of genuine seniority and hard-won experience, would share their thinking with someone still finding their bearings in this space. These are not boards waiting to be told what to do. Will and competence are abundant. But most were also quietly suspicious of anyone claiming to have all the answers right now, whether a consultant, a director, or a fellow investor. Experienced and prepared? Yes. But also willing to learn and adapt. The frameworks are being built in real time, and an open mind is the only sensible way to approach it."

— Daniel Cole

Executive Summary

McKinsey estimates the world requires $106 trillion in infrastructure investment by 2040. Private capital is already meeting a significant share of that demand: global infrastructure fundraising hit a record of nearly $200 billion in 2025, growing 58 percent year on year, while the rest of private markets contracted. LPs continue to name infrastructure as the asset class they most want to increase allocations to, and are moving up the risk curve from core toward value-added and core-plus strategies in search of higher returns.

The governance question that sits behind all of this received less attention than it deserves. As the asset base accelerates into data centres, battery storage, digital networks, and the intersection of energy and AI infrastructure, the frameworks for overseeing these categories are being built in real time. The boards responsible for those assets are improvising, often intelligently, but without the benefit of established precedent.

BoardOutlook convened a Global Infrastructure Roundtable in June 2026, held under Chatham House Rule, to explore that governance gap directly. The session brought together chairs and non-executive directors from across the infrastructure spectrum, alongside a fund manager operating in the energy and AI power supply chain and a sovereign wealth fund alumnus now establishing a new vehicle. The conversation covered four themes: the skills gap on technical assets; LP scrutiny and evolving governance expectations; governing assets without established frameworks; and what is actually working in boardrooms in practice.

The Skills Gap on Technical Assets

The infrastructure asset class has always demanded specialist knowledge, but the expansion of what counts as infrastructure has accelerated that challenge sharply. A board that was well composed for ports, pipelines, and regulated utilities may find itself materially under-equipped for data centres, EV charging networks, and grid-scale battery storage. These are not variations on familiar themes. They are genuinely new governance problems.

Scars matter more than credentials

The strongest and most consistent view expressed was that boards have been filling skills gaps with specialist appointments for the past decade, adding a sustainability director here, a digital director there, and that the model has reached its limits. There are not enough seats. What has been quietly traded away in the process is the harder-to-name quality of operational experience: directors who have actually run large, complex, high-risk infrastructure projects, managed the politics, dealt with the cost overruns, and carry the evidence of it.

"I want hard operational experience. People that have actually run businesses, that have had the projects, that have got the scars on their backs. It builds a much better dynamic with management, because they feel those board members understand what they are going through."

The practical alternative several participants had adopted was to keep operational wisdom at the table and bring specialist knowledge in around it, through technical advisory groups, external advisors reviewing the advice management is already providing, and targeted use of sector specialists for defined periods rather than permanent board appointments.

Infrastructure is not one thing

A related point made with force was that infrastructure is too broad a category to be treated as a single competence for board composition purposes. The risk calculus for a refinery or terminal is entirely different from that of a landfill, which is entirely different again from a rail tunnel, a data centre, or a wind farm. Sector specificity matters in a way that general infrastructure experience does not fully address.

"All of infrastructure is not the same. I don't know a lot about airports or boards. I know a lot about digital. They are not the same as putting me on one versus the other. You'll get something from me, but not necessarily all the components that you need."

The implication for fund managers appointing directors to portfolio company boards is that skills matrices should be built against the specific asset type, not the asset class in aggregate. Several participants noted that failure case studies in infrastructure governance typically show, with hindsight, that the relevant sector experience was not around the table.

One fund manager's approach

One model described in the session generated genuine interest. The approach pairs investment professionals, who originated and closed the deal and bring strong financial analysis, with a parallel structure of operating partners and external NEDs who provide sector depth at board level. The asset management team sits across the full portfolio and provides centralised briefing to all directors.

When a macro event occurs, the team synthesises the implications across the portfolio and pushes specific questions to directors before their next board meeting. After the Iberian power outage, directors received a prompt within days: have you had the conversation with management about what happens if power is down for more than twelve hours? That kind of centralised, portfolio-level intelligence is a material advantage individual boards sitting in isolation cannot replicate.

Curiosity as a baseline requirement

Several participants noted that beyond composition, the individual disposition of a director matters more than any credentials. The pace of change in infrastructure means formal expertise ages quickly. What does not age is genuine curiosity, the willingness to keep reading, to access primary material rather than curated summaries, and to stay genuinely interested across the full range of what the asset base now involves.

"It probably behoves all directors to be amazingly curious and not accepting of the status quo. The model of infrastructure as boring, big assets just sitting there churning out returns, is kind of gone."

LP Scrutiny and Evolving Governance Expectations

LPs are asking different questions than they were five years ago, and the divergence between geographies has become one of the more practically challenging aspects of fund management.

The ESG geography

European and Australian LPs have continued to raise their expectations around climate-related disclosure, transition planning, and sustainability reporting. North American LPs are more fragmented. At the extreme of the recent political cycle, fund managers described auditing the language in LP communications state by state, with some investors in certain states hostile to the word sustainability itself. That intensity appears to have moderated slightly, but the basic divide remains: California and New York engaged, others ranging from indifferent to actively cautious.

"At one point you could get discounted in certain states simply for having a sustainability strategy. Not for what was in it. Just for having one."

The practical response several managers had adopted was to reframe the same underlying practice around the language of resilience and organisational health rather than sustainability. The point made was that good asset management and good ESG practice are the same thing under different names. The framing should serve the audience without compromising the substance.

What LPs are asking that they were not asking before

Beyond ESG, participants noted a sharper LP focus on board composition itself: whether the right skills are actually around the table for the specific assets being governed, not just in aggregate. Questions about cyber resilience and tested business continuity protocols are becoming standard in due diligence. For those raising capital into newer asset categories, LPs want to understand not just the investment thesis but who will be governing the assets and what they actually know about the sector.

Governing Assets Without Established Frameworks

The third theme produced the most candid conversation of the session. Several participants were direct about the fact that for some of the assets they currently oversee, the governance frameworks they are applying are being invented as they go.

New asset categories, unmapped failure modes

Data centres, battery storage at grid scale, EV charging networks, direct air capture: these assets sit within the infrastructure universe but have no deep body of governance precedent to draw on. The regulatory frameworks are incomplete or non-existent. The historical failure data does not exist. The analogies from legacy infrastructure help but do not fully translate.

The response being developed in practice combines several elements: external technical advisors who can validate the advice management is providing; second-checkpoint models where the board appoints someone specifically to review and challenge what management is telling them rather than to advise directly; and greater frequency of crisis and scenario exercises so that when something does go wrong, the response is not being improvised from scratch.

Water: the pricing dilemma

Water infrastructure provided the most vivid illustration of governing an asset where the framework is under genuine strain. Boards overseeing water utilities in Australia and New Zealand are confronting a structural contradiction: prices must rise substantially to fund the investment required just to maintain existing service standards, before any new demand from population growth or data centres is added. But public expectation, deeply held, is that water should cost close to nothing. Private capital involvement sharpens that tension further.

"Water is one of the hardest areas because people kind of don't expect to pay for it. It comes out of the sky. And so although prices go up, people don't associate a value with it. Then you add the cost-of-living crisis and all of those essential services become a very sharp political reality."

The UK water sector was raised as a cautionary case. Community sentiment, once hardened against an infrastructure owner, is extremely difficult to shift with facts alone. The window to build public legitimacy is before the project becomes visible, not after. A major desalination project was cited as the counter-example: the project team invested heavily in the local community before construction started, supporting schools, engaging on environmental concerns, and building relationships with every relevant stakeholder group. By the time ground broke, the opposition had largely been won over and the project was delivered faster as a result.

Crisis preparedness is not keeping pace with crisis frequency

Across multiple participants and multiple asset types, the same gap surfaced: crisis exercise frequency is not matching the pace at which novel risks are emerging. The airline industry was held up repeatedly as the relevant benchmark. Airlines practice emergency scenarios on a quarterly basis because regulators require it, and the muscle memory that builds is the difference between a credible response and a damaging one.

Most infrastructure boards are conducting one crisis exercise a year at best, often less. Average executive tenure is shorter than it was a decade ago, which means fewer people in the room who have managed a real crisis. And the tolerance for poor crisis management has fallen sharply: social media means the narrative of an event is told before management has had time to act, which collapses the window that used to exist for quiet remediation.

"The standard required today when something does go wrong is just so high. You don't have the time to learn in a crisis anymore. You have got to be skilled at it, like the airline industry is. And I'd hold them up as best practice."

One participant described a terminal fire at an airport they Chair the week before the session as evidence that preparation pays. The team handled it well. The preparation showed. Several contrasted that with organisations where the absence of practice was equally visible in the response.

Cyber has changed character

The cost of launching a sophisticated cyber attack has fallen to the point where the question is no longer whether an incident will happen but when, and whether the response has been practised enough to execute under pressure. Several participants described a shift from perimeter-defence thinking to what one called moat thinking: identifying what must be protected if the perimeter fails, and hardening that explicitly rather than relying on prevention alone.

The geopolitical layer

A final observation that had not been on the original agenda came from a participant with deep exposure to the US energy and AI power supply chain. The US administration's restriction of access to advanced AI models for foreign nationals was raised as a live example of a new category of infrastructure risk: the weaponisation of technology access as a geopolitical tool. The argument was that power infrastructure, and the data centre and AI capacity it enables, is increasingly a matter of strategic national interest. European funds and boards that have built their operations around American technology platforms may face sovereign dependency risks that are only beginning to be priced.

"Whoever wins AI will dominate the next decades as the superpower. That makes the ability to deliver AI, which ultimately comes down to power, a matter of strategic national importance. And America has just shown it is willing, for strategic purposes, to throttle people's ability to use the latest models."

What Is Actually Working

The technical advisory group. The most widely endorsed structural innovation was the technical advisory group sitting alongside the board rather than consuming seats at the table. Common features across the variations described: two or three board members to maintain the governance connection, external specialists who can challenge the advice management is providing, a defined advisory scope, and a clear pipeline back to the full board. For organisations moving into infrastructure from a different base, the advisory group was the mechanism for building knowledge intentionally rather than hoping it would accumulate through exposure.

The second checkpoint. Where deep sector knowledge is absent, the most practical short-term solution described was appointing an external specialist not to advise the board directly but to validate the advice the board is already receiving from management and its consultants. The value is not in what they add but in whether they can confirm the board is being told the right things. This was described as particularly important where vendors are selling products that are not yet fully built and the board has limited basis on which to assess the claims.

Community first. The lesson drawn from that desalination project was not historical. Community engagement is a governance responsibility, not a communications exercise, and the window to build it is before the project is publicly visible. By the time organised opposition can stop a project, facts rarely shift entrenched sentiment. The board needs to be actively overseeing stakeholder strategy from the outset, not receiving updates on it after positions have hardened.

How BoardOutlook Supports Infrastructure Governance

The questions this session surfaced are ones BoardOutlook is built to help with. Board and director evaluations that surface whether the skills documented on a matrix are the skills that are actually showing up in the boardroom. CEO and executive 360s that give fund managers an evidence base for the leadership conversations they need to have at portfolio company level. Skills matrices that can be built against specific asset types rather than broad categories, and that treat sector experience and operational depth as explicit, assessable competences rather than soft descriptors.

For infrastructure funds managing boards across a portfolio of assets, the challenge is not just getting the right people into the right seats. It is building and maintaining the oversight infrastructure that enables those directors to function effectively as the asset base evolves. BoardOutlook provides the structured, data-led process for making that work in practice rather than in theory.

This paper was developed by BoardOutlook based on a Global Infrastructure Roundtable facilitated by Daniel Cole, Private Capital Director, BoardOutlook. The session was held under Chatham House Rule. Participant contributions are reflected thematically and are not individually attributed. For information on upcoming sessions or the BoardOutlook platform, please contact the BoardOutlook team at jingqi.wu@boardoutlook.com.