Overview

The G20 Leaders stressed the importance of quality infrastructure investment to deliver high-quality infrastructure projects at the Hangzhou Summit in September 2016, where it was defined as investment:

“which aims to ensure economic efficiency in view of life-cycle cost, safety, resilience against natural disaster, job creation, capacity building, and transfer of expertise and know-how on mutually agreed terms and conditions, while addressing social and environmental impacts and aligning with economic and development strategies”.

Quality infrastructure has also been a G20 focus under the Japanese Presidency in 2019, resulting in the endorsement of the G20 Principles of Quality Infrastructure Investment.

The aim of this reference guide is to help governments and public sector asset managers to operationalise the dimensions of the quality infrastructure investment definition so that these are realised at the project level, through the consideration of how quality infrastructure objectives are incorporated in the output specifications of long-term infrastructure contracts.

Guidance

The guidance provides the background principles and assumptions used in the development of this Reference Guide, including a definition of Quality Infrastructure, a definition of a PPP, a description of an output specification, an overview of a process to develop an output specification and a discussion on what makes a good output specification.

This Reference Guide is designed to improve the global understanding of this subject to help governments provide their citizens with quality infrastructure assets and services.

Case Studies

The guidance has been informed by examining how the dimensions of quality infrastructure investment have been included at contract level in 14 project case studies from a wide range of sectors and countries, using these examples to communicate the principles of good output specification development and how output specifications can contribute to the delivery of Quality Infrastructure.

Where available, output specifications from these case studies have been directly quoted to provide concrete evidence of how to practically deliver quality infrastructure projects.