Does planning pay to perform in infraestructure? Deconstructing the babylon tower on planning/ Performance relationships in energy, telecomunications and transport sectors – colombian case-

In recent years infrastructure planning has been exposed to challenging forces of decentralisation, globalisation and private sector participation. Infrastructure/overall development relationships have been widely studied and employed by central governments to assess public needs and private interests. Increases in infrastructure investment have been particularly aimed towards increases in overall productivity. Across many emergent economies, this does not appear to have directly generated the expected results in terms of quality of the public infrastructure services and its impact on economic productivity and social development. Well-documented failures have noted that not only macro-economic management is important for the solution of the infrastructure/development equation. They emphasise that problems of efficiency and adaptability in the application of the planning processes involved have also played a crucial role. As a result, different planning methods have evolved to address those challenges, and research has suggested that the simultaneous application of different and complementary methods is the most effective approach. But what is the nature of those methods in infrastructure and to what extent has their combination been effective? The study examines this issue by relating basic characteristics of a planning process with performance of the infrastructure sub-sectors in which they have been applied. Three planning characteristics are explored: flexibility, duration and specificity. The study included all the organisations responsible for central planning of public infrastructure for Energy, Telecommunications and Transport sectors in Colombia. Performance is evaluated through the transformation of series of indicators on financial, physical and operational fields, into an Annual Average Performance (AAP). The Performance Evolution Index (PEI) was developed as an index to examine trends in AAP during the last thirty years. Hypotheses were formulated to explore planning/performance relationships and to consider the impact of the external context on those relationships. Results confirm the simultaneous application of at least three different methods to planning as common practice. Similar combinations of methods across all sub-sectors indicate that these planning processes are conceptually structured and formal (planning school) and operatively unstructured and informal (incrementalism). Its implications on infrastructure performance are essentially moderated by the stability of the external context and the flexibility of the planning process. More instability in the external context is related with less methodological coherence in the planning process. Less flexibility is related to constrained improvements in infrastructure performance when the external context reveals signs of more stability. Longer periods without major methodological changes in planning appear to be related to greater improvements in the long-term performance regardless of the stability in the external context. Therefore, while formal and informal planning approaches are equally effective in infrastructure when properly combined, better results depend on a sustained methodological coherence and a moderated flexibility. The research findings provide a practical planning/performance perspective, an overview of the dynamics of planning processes and a challenging alternative for the evaluation of performance, that has implications for policy makers, planners and other researchers.