help deal with the latter issue. In particular, decision criteria, criteria weighting, and sensitivity analysis should be decided and made transparent in advance of selection, and the data used and resulting analysis should be made publicly available and open to third‐party review.

# **The Infrastructure Prioritization Framework**

The Infrastructure Prioritization Framework (IPF) is a quantitative multi‐criteria prioritization approach that synthetizes project‐level financial, economic, social, and environmental indicators into two indices – social‐environmental and financial‐economic – and considers these alongside the public budget constraint for a particular sector. The IPF differentiates from other multi‐criteria decision tools in four ways. First, it systematically incorporates policy goals, social and environmental sustainability considerations, and long‐term development aims alongside traditional financial factors. Second, it is predicated on parsimony and pragmatism. Third, results are displayed graphically on an intuitive, graphical interface by which decision‐makers can compare alternative investment scenarios. Fourth, it facilitates active deliberation of key decision criteria and priorities for improving project appraisal looking forward. In this way, the process itself is as important as its outputs.

Several empirical issues motivated the construction and ongoing development of IPF. For one, there are significant challenges facing many governments in infrastructure planning, wherein large numbers of infrastructure projects are identified in development plans, which are to be implemented with scarce public resources, limited institutional capacity, and cost and time constraints. Second, these difficult decisions must be made based on currently available or reasonably attainable information for the set of projects. Third, given the imperfect nature of appraisal, it is important that projects be evaluated for “social (including environmental) and economic value” (Dabla‐Norris et al., 2011) in addition to financial impacts, but many of these social and environmental impacts are difficult to monetize. Fourth, there is a desire to balance analytical efficiency, derived from standardization, with policy and political responsiveness, derived from selection of decision criteria.

To the last point, IPF recognizes that the selection of infrastructure projects cannot be divorced from the political economy of project selection. Particular projects may be chiefly valued by governments and other stakeholders due to key policy goals which are non‐economic in nature or due to considerations that objective indicators cannot measure, such as promoting social cohesion, honoring culture, or redistributing wealth to the poor. But selection can be responsive to policy without becoming altogether political. As such, this support framework explicitly accommodates policy responsiveness in two ways: through criteria selection and by leaving a degree of freedom in decision‐making through multiple references for judgment (i.e., two indices).

In addition to building space for political deliberation, consultation, and professional judgment, the following design ideals were incorporated, based on a survey of international best practice:

- The strategic relevance of a project must be determined at the sector level as well as within the appropriate tier of government;

9