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Effective maintenance of rural roads is an essential aspect of public infrastructure delivery. However, governments failed to upkeep the built infrastructure. Accordingly, this study addresses this pressing issue by identifying attributes, skills and resources for asset maintenance. To do this, collaborative governance, a recent plausible alternative in the public policy literature, is used.

The literature review proffered 29 strategies for operationalising collaborative governance principles. A questionnaire survey with the public sector representatives comprising top-level, mid-level and lower-level engineers was used to test the applicability of these strategies in rural infrastructure maintenance of India. The rated responses concerning strategies were subjected to exploratory factor analysis to determine the underlying structure for reducing the dimensions to make them practically operational.

The exploratory factor analysis showed that six dimensions play an essential role in initiating and promoting collaboration. This parsimonious framework suggests building a common collaborative framework, communicating vision and fostering communities, leadership, increasing the industry's capacity, transparency of power and responsibilities, and technical and financial resources. Thus, governments’ initiatives to build collaboration is most prominent in initiating and sustaining a successful collaboration.

The practical strategies reinforced through this study can formalise self-initiated regimes or independently convened regimes to a federally directed regime well within the scope of the national programmes. Thus, findings primarily have considerable implications to emerging countries where reducing the unit costs to save the public exchequer from wastage and preventing assets from becoming dilapidate are essential.

Public sector practitioners often lack the essential skills and innovative thinking and thus offered new knowledge would transform the traditional practices in infrastructure maintenance. Theoretically, the present research advances the understanding of structures and processes for collaborative governance theory to non-contractual infrastructure asset management literature.

A large number of roads have been constructed in the rural areas of India to connect habitations with the nearest major roads. With time, the pavements of these roads have deteriorated and they need some kind of maintenance, although they all do not need maintenance at the same time, as they have all not deteriorated to the same level. Hence, they have to be prioritized for maintenance.

In order to present a scientific methodology for prioritizing pavement maintenance, the factors affecting prioritization and the relative importance of each were identified through an expert survey. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to scientifically establish weight (importance) of each factor based on its relative importance over other factors. The proposed methodology was validated through a case study of 203 low volume rural roads in the state of Himachal Pradesh in India. Ranking of these roads in order of their priority for maintenance was presented as the final result.

The results show that pavement distresses, traffic volume, type of connectivity and the socioeconomic facilities located along a road are the four major factors to be considered in determining the priority of a road for maintenance.

The methodology provides a comprehensive, scientific and socially responsible pavement maintenance prioritization method which will automatically select roads for maintenance without any bias.

Timely maintenance of roads will also save budgetary expenditure of restoration/reconstruction, leading to enhancement of road service life. The government will not only save money but also provide timely benefit to the needy population.

Road transportation is the primary mode of inland transportation in rural areas. Timely maintenance of the pavements will be of great help to the socioeconomic development of rural areas.

The proposed methodology lays special emphasis on rural roads which are small in length, but large in number. Instead of random, a scientific method for selection of roads for maintenance will be of great help to the public works department for better management of rural road network.

This paper aims to identify the main aspects requiring immediate attention in the post-disaster reconstruction of road infrastructure, thereby providing a major synthesis, which advances the understanding in this important area.

Literature and empirical evidence obtained from documents and semi-structured interviews with 28 respondents of three case study districts in Aceh, Indonesia was analysed using NVivo 10. The findings were validated through triangulation with the literature and consultation with the experts in the field of disaster management and road infrastructure.

The authors propose a framework for the reconstruction of road infrastructure, which respond to the peculiarities of road projects in a post-disaster setting. The framework comprises various components requiring detailed attention in the reconstruction process and describes their position in the road project and disaster management cycle.

The framework fills the gap in the body of knowledge with regard to road infrastructure reconstruction in a post-disaster context. For the first time, this paper recognises the importance of local government capacity in the Aceh Province with regard to the sustainability of the post-disaster reconstruction assets.

Although a high proportion of the Ghanaian population live and work in under‐developed areas, research on rural infrastructure development is scarce. The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges confronting rural infrastructure development and the requisite incentives needed to boost it.

An inductive methodological approach was adopted using a structured questionnaire to survey the perceptions of rural contractors.

Incentive systems identified include the provision of mobilization funds for projects; a plant pool for rural contractors; special allowance for rates of project items; and provision of letters of credit to secure loans for projects. Key challenges confronting rural construction were identified as a lack of financial institutions willing to support projects with funds; lack of potable water; lack of good health care systems; and lack of a goods market to supply materials.

Identification of challenges and incentive systems for rural infrastructure development provides an opportunity to reinvigorate rural infrastructural development in sub‐Saharan Africa.

The study will be of value to all project partners throughout the supply chain who contemplate rural infrastructure development.

The paper presents a novel epitome of rural infrastructure delivery in the developing country of Ghana.

Such rural development programs are quite demanding in their organizational requirements. First, the implementing agency must have a special commitment to the delivery of program services to the rural poor. In social systems it is unnatural for benefits to be dispensed equally, much less redistributed toward the disadvantaged. Some inner or outer dynamic force must motivate the organization to overcome the momentum of inequality.

It is well known that public infrastructure, particularly the transportation infrastructure sector, is notorious for low efficiency, spending waste and corruption. Achieving the efficiency of public infrastructure investment is a crucial element to improve the current deteriorating condition of American transportation infrastructure system. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This research utilizes an input-oriented, variable return to scale non-parametric data envelopment analysis to estimate the relative cost efficiency of highway infrastructure investment among the 48 American continental states from 1995 to 2009.

The empirical results reveal that there is a large efficiency variation among state highway infrastructure systems.

In addition, state governments on average reach 95.8 percent of the efficiency of their best practice peers in terms of providing quality highway infrastructure outcomes.

Recently, there has been a call for replication research to validate empirical findings, especially findings that are important for development policies. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to replicate the estimation results from Mu and van de Walle (2011).

The author used raw data sets provided by Mu Ren and Dominique van de Walle and the same methods of Mu and van de Walle (2011). In addition to the pure replication, the author conducted the two extensions: sensitivity analysis of covariates and bandwidth selection and analysis of the effect of the road project on additional outcome variables.

Overall, the author ables to replicate most estimates from Mu and van de Walle (2011). The author find a positive effect of rural roads on local market development. The impact estimates of the road project are not sensitive to the selection of the bandwidth in kernel propensity score (PS) matching. There are no significant effects of road projects on additional outcomes, including access to credit and migration.

The study confirms a positive effect of rural roads on local market development. Thus, the government can provide investment in rural roads to improve the local market and its welfare.

This study tried to replicate and verify an important study on the impact of the rural road in Vietnam.

Although South African landowners have been subject to various forms of land tax in the past, the ownership (or occupation) of agricultural land is not taxed at present. Despite the fact that white agricultural landowners are strongly opposed to the possible introduction of a rural land tax, political and fiscal pressures in present‐day South Africa seem to suggest that the imposition of such a tax is inevitable. It is suggested that it could be equitable, and would be administratively feasible, to levy, assess and collect a rural land tax at local government level within the commercial farming sub‐sector, but that levying such a tax on subsistence farmers occupying communal land poses serious problems.