The sectoral lens and beyond: Exploring the multidimensional perspectives of sustainable road infrastructure development

Abstract

The incorporation of sustainability into road infrastructure development by public agencies in developing countries is limited by what they understand by the notion and how it can be adopted into their tasks. A limited sectoral perspective often dominates this understanding, leading a limited focus on specific sectoral elements included into a policy. This paper offers a framework and a methodology that will equip the agencies to incorporate the concept in an integrative way. A literature review was first conducted to develop the framework, followed by its exploration in the case study of Indonesia's Trans-Java road network corridors. This framework expands the sectoral perspective into a more comprehensive one, conceptualizing sustainability as contributions of various sectoral elements, which are still less integrated. The framework accounts for infrastructure and spatial and temporal dimensions, in which environmental, social, and economic effects of road development are discussed and shown to be interrelated. Institutional and political aspects were also added to the framework that demonstrate capacities for and constraints on integration. This study suggests a mixed scanning methodology to incorporate sustainability into road infrastructure development by paying attention to public agencies' tasks and the application's contexts.