Planning of National Transport Infrastructure
In the Islamic Countries
141
planning horizons might constitute a problem for developing countries as their available
capacities are limited.
 Because an NTMP is a visionary long-term document, it is mostly considered to be
transport policies, which is an anomaly. This is not the case in countries that do not have
an NTMP but a medium-term transport plan instead, which is driven by a higher-level
vision or policy. A policy provides an opportunity for structured stakeholder and
transport user engagement to discuss a wide range of issues in the dynamic and rapidly
changing transport sector.
 NTMPs in the OIC region are mostly a product of IFI intervention and may not have been
produced endogenously. They enable IFIs to contextualize their investments.
2. Institutional and organizational factors
 NTMPs are mostly developed by the Ministry of Transport, while in the countries that
do not have an NTMP, the national infrastructure development plan is mostly developed
by the Ministry of Economy.
 An institutional gap between the national and regional governments is very common;
hence this needs to be addressed.
 Transport planning agencies are sometimes not multidisciplinary and cross sectoral,
and this causes problems in preparing plans that meet their multifarious objectives.
Furthermore, they do not have adequate authority to raise funds for investments, which
is then mostly done through the Ministry of Finance. They also do not really have
adequate capacity to prepare plans relying totally on outsourcing to consultants.
3. Technical factors
 Most of the NTI plans focus more on road and rail infrastructure with no attention to
non-motorised transport. Furthermore, the integration of land use planning and
transport planning is well-acknowledged by the OIC countries, yet this is scarcely
present in practice.
 Very few NTI plans are developed based on an outcome-oriented approach that drives
concerted performance measurement efforts at national and local levels.
 A systematic basis for prioritizing projects appears to be missing.
 A national traffic model does not always exist. Traffic forecasts are mostly made for each
project and are normally too high.
4. Procedural factors and financing
 The transport planning approach in most of the OIC countries is top-down with the
leader’s vision sets the strategic direction of the infrastructure development of the
country. The transport planning process is therefore highly centralized mainly coming
from President of Republic and Prime Minister’s Office.
 The involvement of the private sector in the transport planning process is very low if
not zero. As such plans have not been aligned to fiscal space and this results in very little
private funding of transport investments. The same applies to the involvement of
academia, which is a waste of intellectual resources.