Frontier and high-growth markets are not riskier than mature markets in every respect. They are risky in ways that are poorly priced and rarely written down. We assess political, regulatory and investment-climate risk as it bears on a specific decision — a concession horizon, a phasing plan, a land position, a capital commitment — and deliver a judgement an investment committee or board can act on, not a country rating.
We establish how decisions are actually made in the market: where authority sits, which institutions hold it durably, and how exposed the reform coalition behind a programme is to transition or succession. The horizon that matters is the asset's, not the electoral cycle's — a thirty-year concession requires a view on whether the arrangement survives the people who signed it.
We test the reliability of the specific instruments an investment depends on — land tenure and registration, permitting and licensing, contract enforceability and the practical route to dispute resolution — against the precedent record rather than the statute. What matters is not whether protections exist on paper, but how they have behaved when tested, and against whom.
We assess convertibility and profit repatriation, the fiscal capacity of the state or state-owned counterparty to honour long-dated obligations, and sanctions, ownership and integrity exposure across the counterparty chain. For PPP and concession structures this frequently determines bankability more than the underlying demand case does.
We stress-test the strategy against a defined set of scenarios and structure the mitigations into the deal itself — phasing and staged commitment, governance and step-in rights, political risk insurance, and development finance or multilateral participation used deliberately as a stabiliser. The output is a set of decisions, not a risk register.
Country risk is rarely a standalone question. It surfaces inside a feasibility study whose returns assume a stable regulatory regime, inside an investment attraction mandate that has to answer an investor's first objection, and inside a PPP structure whose whole logic is the allocation of risk between public and private parties. We run this assessment as a discrete engagement where a decision requires it, and as a stress test embedded in the strategy work where it does not.
Our work covers political, regulatory and investment-climate risk as it affects capital allocation and programme design. It is deliberately scoped to the investment decision: we do not provide operational or physical security consulting, protective services, or crisis response, and we will say so plainly where a mandate calls for them.
Speak directly with a senior partner about your project, asset or programme.
Get in Touch