Decision analysis for an Afghanistan sustainable infrastructure plan (ASIP) with volatile emergent conditions

The Afghanistan National Development Strategy (ANDS) identifies over $50 billion of needs for infrastructure development over decades, in transportation, water, energy, telecommunications, and other areas. The US Department of Defense and US Department of State jointly coordinate over $10 billion of US funding in support for infrastructure development to stimulate and complement the resources of other government and non-government investors and donors. Projects have been identified across four investor/donor organizations but prioritization of investments, especially to achieve regional sustainability, has been a challenge because of the volatile situation and complexities of negotiation among investors and donors. Our effort (i) develops a methodology to prioritize major infrastructure projects under competing assumptions of emergent conditions including security, economic, environmental, workforce, and others, and (ii) demonstrates the methodology with twenty-seven major infrastructure projects of the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan. The effort supports government and nongovernment investors, donors, and stakeholders to make effective investments in Afghanistan infrastructure development under volatile emergent conditions. The effort develops three levels of analysis. In the first level, economic and demographic data are used to prioritize needs for infrastructure development. The second level of the methodology evaluates the impacts of selected projects across fourteen performance criteria derived from the ANDS, highlighting the sensitivity of the impacts to uncertain emergent conditions through an innovative re-weighting of the performance criteria. In the third level, the methodology identifies technical and non-technical requirements and dependencies among projects in a schedule and critical path analysis. This effort has been refined in a workshop of Afghanistan expatriates and representatives of US agencies. The next steps of the effort include providing t- raining materials and embedding the methodology to a decision-aiding software for use in the thirty-four provinces of Afghanistan.