Earlier this autumn FAST-Infra Group published its review of the first half of 2026 under the title “From Awareness to Adoption”. The headline figures were thirteen events in seven countries and 146 additional infrastructure projects completing a self-assessment against the FAST-Infra Sustainable Infrastructure Label. Those are good numbers for a small secretariat, and I am proud of them. But the title was chosen deliberately, and it is worth explaining why.
A label lives or dies on whether anyone changes their behaviour because of it. For the first few years of any standard, the honest metric is awareness: who has heard of it, who has tried it, who turned up to the workshops. By 2026 the Label had reached the point where awareness was no longer the constraint. Developers in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia were self-assessing projects without being asked, and sponsors were starting to cite the Label in their own reporting. The question shifted from “do people know about this” to “does it change anything for the project”.
That is a harder question to answer, and the second half of the year is largely about answering it. Does a labelled project reach financial close faster, or at all? Does it attract a different class of lender, a longer tenor, a lower margin, a guarantee it would not otherwise have had? Does it make the asset easier to insure? These are outcome questions, and they need evidence from the projects themselves rather than from event attendance. Building that evidence base, alongside the resilience and insurability work that has become one of our two thematic pillars, is where my attention has gone since the review was published.
Two things made the first half of 2026 work. One was partnership: almost every event was co-organised with a member, a development bank or a national industry body, which is the only way a one-person secretariat reaches seven countries. The other was the shift towards self-assessment as the entry point to the Label, which lowered the cost of a first engagement without lowering the bar for verification later. Both will carry into 2027.
The full review is available through FAST-Infra Group’s channels. If you work on a project that has used the Label and would be willing to share what happened next, I would very much like to hear from you; that is precisely the evidence we need.