Institutions are the arrangements for the production, distribution and consumption of a service. One set of arrangements with which this paper is concerned relates to governments in the public provision of local roads in Indonesia, which account for 80 percent of total road length. The current 5-year Development Plan aims over the next 25 years to connect more than 66,000 villages into a network of rural roads. The institutional challenge is to get the process right of screening, monitoring and evaluating local roads. Research has been conducted into this planning and evaluation cycle with an aim to improve current methods. "Bottom up" planning and prescreening criteria are currently used and these institutional arrangements are described. Our approach is to apply multiattribute decision methods to allow decision makers to set priorities amongst competing projects. A questionnaire survey has been administered to the seven major institutions (30 percent response rate) across all provinces to establish views (n=118) on the rank order of road attributes such as economic, social or environmental factors, to measure the degree of commonality in response and to determine the weights to attach to each attribute. Similarities and differences by institutional response and region are based on statistical analyses of the data. Based on these findings the authors construct multiattribute utility functions for each attribute separately and suggest such a model is sufficiently robust for application across Indonesia in the screening of local roads. A computer program has been written and a hypothetical example is presented. (A)
Abstract