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8 - Roads and Regional Development

Process Management

There is a high demand for approaches to managing the process of cooperative road planning. Here, we focus on the general tasks of a project director (a road planning team leader in a road agency).

There needs to be a frequent exchange between three main management aspects: procedure, content and wider cooperation process. This exchange between lawyers, process managers and plan developers needs to be managed explicitly:

Legal procedure

Choices with respect to the process but also content determine how procedures can be applied adequately, in which order and effectively without risk of unnecessary legal delay. Being aware of procedures in a late stage is a risk. Procedures also may become a formality if enough support can be generated in the process. Details about specific procedures themselves can be found in the modules economy and environment, and also in country system analyses.

Content

What type of decision will be made, about what? Which information about impacts and alternative courses of action is required from a point of view of process and procedure (what matters for stakeholders, what matters to lawyers?) What are conditions for financers to participate? In which degree do politically relevant stakeholders believe that potentially better alternatives have been investigated sufficiently? In which degree is there a legal risk if certain information would not be provided? How have specific issues of content been interpreted in legal procedures in the past? Details about dealing with content in specific situations can be found in the modules economy and environment, and also in country system analyses.

Wider cooperation process

A good relationship with interested and potentially affected groups is useful to anticipate how they will behave in the future, and whether they will cooperate. There are several levels of involvement. For close involvement of stakeholders, selectiveness is required or a process becomes complex. More distant involvement is often called public consultation or participation. Conflicts of interest are normal and can be reduced to their core by jointly discussing content and procedure. Horse trading is not pretty but can produce agreement. Remaining conflicts are to be settled by a competent political decision within legal boundaries. No party gains from a regular turn to legal appeals.

You can find an evaluation of Dutch experiences of project directors in this draft paper.

A final management aspect is:

Internal management of the planning process

Managing an interdisciplinary team of plan developers (lawyers, road developers representing a competent authority, environmental experts, public participation experts, financers, dealing with consultants).

Some links to useful information:

The remarkable return of comprehensice policy analysis in The Netherlands is a paper by Harry Geerlings and Martin de Jong in Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal Vol 21 (4) pp. 281-302. It explains how social cost benefit analysis is used to prevent wrong decisions about infrastructure rather than develop right decisions.

The main parts of the SEA manual of DG Tren (1999), which has a section about the cooperation in SEA and setting up teams.

Managing Stakeholder Involvement in Decision Making: A Comparative Analysis of Six Interactive Processes in the Netherlands, a paper by the administrative scientists ass. prof. Jurian Edelenbos and prof. Erik Hans Klijn

Anticipatory Management; Tools for Better Decision Making

Strategic Decision Making References

Ground rules equalize power as governmental agencies manage citizen involvement

A decision support system for assessing alternative projects for the design of a new road network: methodology and application of a case study

Improving the Road Planning Process: A Case Study of Stakeholder Comments on Two Swedish Road Projects