Historically, infrastructure has been the domain of government entities and public servants. The rest of us use infrastructure every day but otherwise give it little thought. We either take these assets for granted or else view them with mild disdain, quick to complain about shortcomings and inefficiencies. And for most institutional investors, infrastructure has scarcely been on the radar — until recently.

Times indeed are changing, and a confluence of factors is pointing to the growing role that infrastructure investing will play in the decades ahead. That presumption can be supported largely by rudimentary economic theory. There is an urgent need for infrastructure assets globally, and at the same time there is an emerging appetite among institutional investors for investments that share the characteristics of the infrastructure asset class. If we toss in the fact that the traditional means of infrastructure funding are proving to be woefully insu