informed deliberation regarding criteria selection and any pre‐decisions of a policy nature (Mandri‐Perrott, Marcelo, & Haddon, 2015).

Fifth, governments must be aware of potential sequencing conflicts related to the timing of project selection processes in different ministries and line agencies. One strategy to mitigate this is for central government to oversee and provide guidance for systematizing project selection and coordinating sectorial prioritization activities.

Last, planning offices and decision makers must be familiarized with the multi‐ criteria approach to build credibility of the decision support tool itself, requiring consultation and clear explanation of the technical inputs and model structure. While some fluency with established quantification methods like CBA is observed, there is a certain degree of risk aversion associated with applying new methods. Building acceptance of the decision support tool itself is critical to legitimizing the analysis (Mandri‐Perrott, Marcelo, & Haddon, 2015).

# _Panama: Transport and Water and Sanitation_

In Panama, the conflation of the current economic outlook and three institutional supports spurred the IPF pilot. GDP growth and economic buoyancy in 2014 motivated an ambitious public investment program, accompanied by a high number of infrastructure project proposals to the Ministry of Economics and Finance. Nevertheless, the proposed set of projects exceeded the available funding space and allowable deficit ceiling, demanding selection of some projects and postponement of others. The application of a prioritization methodology was endorsed in the Government Strategic Plan 2015‐2019 and a draft amendment to the 2008 Social Fiscal Responsibility Law, which stated that a system of prioritization strategies was needed for infrastructure development in the future. Similarly, the public investment law contained implementation notes to employ a prioritization strategy tied to the five‐year investment plan 2015. The 2015 World Bank Country Partnership Framework (CPF) also called for application of a prioritization tool. These factors confirmed demand for prioritization of investments in infrastructure planning.

The IPF was applied to a selection of 35 proposed projects in water supply and sanitation and 19 in transport. These projects were identified in consultation with the Ministry of Economics and Finance. The pilot offered a key opportunity to replicate and refine the existing framework, in that it entailed decision analysis based on limited financial‐economic data, particularly for a portion of the water projects. In this way, it replicated a common input problem for infrastructure decision‐making, namely restrictions on data.

Planners from several agencies, in consultation with the Ministry of Economy and Finance and a team from the World Bank, agreed on a set of component SEI and FEI variables. The SEI variables initially selected included the number of beneficiaries (BEN), direct jobs created during implementation (EMP), the population of poor serviced by the project (POOR), social and environmental risks (SER), and the carbon footprint (CO2). The final analysis used only the first three, due to data problems and lack of specificity in the risk variable.<sup>17</sup>

> 17. See Marcelo, Mandri‐Perrott, & House, 2015 for a description of these challenges.

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