IV. Methodology

At a glance

• Infrastructure Australia has used a set of best-practice methodologies to develop and assess reforms for the 2021 Australian Infrastructure Plan and the 2021 Reform Priority List. This approach incorporates practices developed with infrastructure sector and government policy implementation units and considers social impact and behavioural insights as well as economic factors.

• By applying a theory of change framework, each reform comprises a hierarchy of related actions that contribute to an ultimate outcome:

- a recommendation that aligns with the proposed reform for the sector or policy area and identifies the ultimate outcome that the reform targets

- intermediate outcomes that align a series of related activities with a desired outcome that is a precondition for the ultimate outcome

- activities that describe a change in behaviour and its direct output(s), which will help to unlock the preconditions for change and contribute to an intermediate outcome, which in turn will contribute to the ultimate outcome.

• Infrastructure Australia has proposed a change agent to sponsor, lead or support each action. Australian Government departments have been identified to sponsor recommendations where national coordination is appropriate, although they may not implement all of the actions in the recommendation themselves. Proposed leads implement outcomes and actions, in partnership with supporting change agents.

• The 2021 Implementation Pathway organises the different actions for each identified change agent over the 15-year horizon of the 2021 Plan, comprising recommendations, intermediate outcomes and activities.

• The 2021 Reform Priority List outlines how we have applied multi-criteria analysis to qualitatively assess the impacts of the 29 recommendations. Each recommendation is assessed against 13 impact categories, including 33 criteria that determine its impacts on services for users, community sustainability, ease of implementation and risks.

• Multi-criteria analysis has identified Place, Industry, and Water reforms as having the largest positive impact on outcomes that matter to the community.