Leveraging vulnerability: Debts and promises

When I saw the first version of this paper a few weeks before, it was presented at the AAG meeting held in Detroit in April 2025, I recognized that there seemed to be two very interesting stories taking shape that were both novel and exciting. The first story is one that emerges from Furlong's long-standing interest in what she terms trickle-down debt (Furlong, 2011; Furlong, 2021). This is the story of how large-scale infrastructure projects and public utility companies in the Global South (systems providing poor populations with basic needs such as water, electricity and gas) get caught within a debt trap that forces them to push their debt down to consumers. Her focus, in this work, is on the debt relationship itself, particularly how it is securitized, compounded and ultimately leads to wealth transfers from South to North. Her underlying concern here is how basic needs infrastructure is imagined by creditors as an income generator rather than as something that should be financed as a public good.