Infrastructure has always been difficult to get right. Apart from the technical challenges, poor governance of infrastructure is a major reason why infrastructure projects fail to meet their timeframe, budget, and service delivery objectives. Getting Infrastructure Right: a Framework for Better Governance lays out practical governance tools to help policy makers improve the management of infrastructure policy from strategic planning to project-level delivery.

Infrastructure is one of the backbones of both productivity and inclusiveness: Firms derive much of their competitive edge from their ability to use modern infrastructures, while societies depend on good infrastructure to ensure equal opportunity and equal access to services for citizens. Nevertheless, infrastructure has always been difficult to get right. Apart from the technical challenges, poor governance of infrastructure is a major reason why infrastructure projects fail to meet their timeframe, budget, and service delivery objectives.

Infrastructure has always been difficult to get right. Apart from the technical challenges, poor governance of infrastructure is a major reason why infrastructure projects fail to meet their timeframe, budget, and service delivery objectives. This chapter highlights the current challenges that policy makers are facing today, including the lack of leadership, well defined areas of responsibility and pipeline prioritisation; unstable regulatory frameworks and weak institutional capacity across levels of government; political and social opposition, as well as high vulnerability to corruption, capture and financial mismanagement at all stages of the infrastructure governance cycle.

This chapter presents the ten dimensions of the framework for the governance of public infrastructure. The dimensions relate to how governments prioritise, plan, budget, deliver, regulate and evaluate infrastructure investment, and are based on substantive work by the OECD Network of Senior PPP and Infrastructure Officials. Each area covers the principal objective of policy in each area, followed by key questions decision makers need to address and indicators identifying the enabling factors.

This Chapter assesses current practices in OECD members and partners countries and links them to the different dimensions of infrastructure governance. The analysis shows that for some dimensions good practices are common among all countries, such as the use of value for money mechanisms and consultation procedure. However, many other practices recommended by the framework are less present and demand attention. Deficits can be identified, for example, with respect to long term planning, prioritisation and coordination practices, as well as transparent and systematic decision making. In general no single best practice country group can be identified which reflects the importance of improving infrastructure governance across countries.