Critiquing Sustainable Development as Materially Constituted: Infrastructure, Political Ecology, and Political Ontology in the Amazon

I argue that contemporary trajectories for sustainable development (spearheaded by the UN's Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs) are being co-constituted by development's contemporary political economy, one heavily influenced by infrastructure-led development. SDG 9, as a clear example, is committed to Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure and includes the "proportion of the rural population who live within 2 km of an all-season road" as its first indicator (UN, 2015). I review existing debates on sustainable development and propose extending geographical treatments of infrastructure with political ecology and Latin American debates on political ontology to rethink how sustainable development is redefined and reformed by new roads in the Amazon.