Planning of National Transport Infrastructure
In the Islamic Countries
25
Only a fraction of the plans mentioned as examples is publicly available. The others are not
published in a public domain. This holds both for countries within and outside the OIC
geography.
When comparing formal procedures to isolated decision making, Mackie (2014) refers to
psychological reasons that apply to humans in general. This is when he explains why formal and
procedural selection and appraisal guidance in NTI planning is to be preferred to isolated
decisions by decision makers:
 We are not good at considering many variables and aspects simultaneously; instead we
tend to focus on one or very few aspects and are often unaware that we do this;
 We usually reach decisions very rapidly based on gut instinct or subconscious analogy.
Then we tend to look for evidence and arguments which support the decision;
 We are prone to wishful thinking, optimism bias and loss aversion, so we have
difficulties in abandoning an idea or a decision once we have settled for it;
 We tend to over-generalize, turning anecdotes or single cases into general rules;
 We are not good at understanding or comparing different orders of magnitude;
 Moreover, we are not aware of these processes and if made aware of them can find them
quite threatening.
We are also prone to making assumptions, which once made tend to be forgotten and not
followed up. Keeping track of assumptions and managing them properly is one of the single
biggest weakness in planning. If the assumptions were seriously monitored then the probability
of outcomes being achieved will be more realistically assessed.
OECD (2017) in its review of infrastructure planning strategies in the transport and energy
sectors identifies three similarities in how OECD countries do their planning, being that
 the assessment of need for infrastructure investment is predominantly driven by
population and economic growth rates;
 scenarios are used to consider different possible outcomes;
 different forms of stakeholder consultation are part of the process.
In the following sections, the procedural aspects of NTI related to finance, stakeholder
consultation and planning horizon, are elaborated.
2.5.1. Procedural Factors in OIC Countries
Funding
Funding in OIC countries is predominantly following the conventional routing of public finance
or tax funding. Alternative funding is private funding. User-based funding can be combined both
with public and private funding. According to the survey that has been undertaken within the
framework of this study, only 34% of the OIC member states indicate that the level of private
funding is high, and the rest indicated that the level of private funding is between mediocre to
very low. Similarly Academics indicated that they agreed.