The 2021 Plan draws on established policy development frameworks to identify deliverable reforms that support quality of life for all Australians.
Theory of change has been used to identify reform pathways and articulate the activities that build towards this change. Theory of change describes activities that enable change to happen by bridging the gap between the status quo and the desired long-term outcomes. It applies critical systems thinking to the design, implementation and evaluation of policy initiatives.
The application of theory of change has been pioneered in the social impact sector, but is increasingly applied to supporting change management in other sectors with complex issues and changes that impact users and communities.
It is used by leading policy and research agencies, such as the CSIRO in their Impact Framework3 and the United Kingdom's Nesta Innovation Foundation.4
Multi-criteria analysis is a tool for assessing and comparing options in both policy and project prioritisation processes. It is often used to complement and target quantitative analyses such as cost-benefit analysis and regulatory impact statements, which should be undertaken by agencies implementing a recommendation.
For the 2021 Plan, Infrastructure Australia has used multi-criteria analysis to assess:
• the trade-offs between beneficial impacts for community sustainability and services for users against the ease and risks of implementation
• the impact of reforms against a set of criteria designed to identify these benefits, risks and challenges
• alignment of recommendations with a set of government policy priorities
• the recommendations that are likely to be resilient to a set of future scenarios.
Together, theory of change and multi-criteria analysis provide a holistic framework for policy design and impact assessment.
Theory of change articulates how the activities in each recommendation will lead to the intended outcomes by linking the logical steps together over the 2021 Plan's 15-year timeline. It underpins the 2021 Implementation Pathway, which shows the actions for change agents that have been identified to lead and support reforms. Multi-criteria analysis identifies the expected impacts of each recommendation.
In addition to using multi-criteria analysis to assess the recommendations in the 2021 Plan, Infrastructure Australia has recently included multi-criteria analysis guidance in the 2021 refresh of the Infrastructure Australia Assessment Framework.5