Infrastructure are increasingly being recognized as too rigid to quickly adapt to a changing climate and a non-stationary future. This rigidness poses risks to infrastructure service delivery and public welfare. Adaptivity in infrastructure is critical for managing uncertainties to continue providing services, yet little is known about how infrastructure can be made more agile and flexible for improved adaptive capacity. A literature review identified approximately fifty examples of novel infrastructure and technologies which support adaptivity through one or more of ten theoretical characteristics of adaptive infrastructure. From these examples, several infrastructure forms and possible strategies for adaptivity emerged, including smart technologies, combined centralized/decentralized organizational structures, and renewable electricity generation. With institutional and cultural support, such novel structures and systems have the potential to transform infrastructure provision and management.

The capacities of our infrastructure systems to respond to volatile, uncertain, and increasingly complex environments are increasingly recognized as vital for resilience. Pervasive across infrastructure literature and discourse are the concepts of centralized, decentralized, and distributed systems, and there appears to be growing interest in how these configurations support or hinder adaptive and transformative capacities towards resilience. There does not appear to be a concerted effort to align how these concepts are used, and what different configurations mean for infrastructure systems. This is problematic because how infrastructure are structured and governed directly affects their capabilities to respond to increasing complexity. We review framings of centralization, decentralization, and distributed (referred to collectively as de/centralization) across infrastructure sectors, revealing incommensurate usage leading to polysemous framings. De/centralized networks are often characterized by proximity to resources, capacity of distribution, volume of product, and number of connections. De/centralization of governance within infrastructure sectors is characterized by the number of actors who hold decision-making power. Notably, governance structures are often overlooked in infrastructure de/centralization literature. Next, we describe how de/centralization concepts are applied to emerging resilient infrastructure theory, identifying conditions under which they support resilience principles. While centralized systems are dominant in practice and decentralized systems are promoted in resilience literature, all three configurations—centralized, decentralized, and distributed—were found to align with resilience capacities in various contexts of stability and instability. Going forward, we recommend a multi-dimensional framing of de/centralization through a network-governance perspective where capabilities to shift between stability and instability are paramount and information is a critical mediator.