Introduction
In July 2025, the government of India's Odisha state signed an agreement with the International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank Group, to jointly develop a pipeline of bankable infrastructure projects worth approximately 20 billion rupees (about 2.4 billion US dollars). Under the agreement, the two sides will screen and prepare around 20 investment-attractive PPP (public-private partnership) projects in key sectors. This cooperation is not simply technical assistance; it reflects a deep shift taking place in global infrastructure project promotion: moving from circulating project lists to investors, toward systematically building a pipeline of projects that are financeable, tradable, and deliverable.
For investment promotion agencies (IPAs) and economic development departments, infrastructure projects involve capital volumes, risk structures, and public interests that far exceed ordinary foreign investment projects, so their promotion logic is fundamentally different. This article attempts to answer: Why are traditional infrastructure investment attraction methods becoming ineffective? What common patterns exist in international good practices? What methodological frameworks can practitioners draw on?
Part One: Problems and Background — Why "Project Lists" Are No Longer Enough
Over the past decade or more, most government departments have adopted a "project list" model when promoting infrastructure projects: the development and reform commission, finance bureau, or sector regulator selects a batch of planned road, port, water, or energy projects, attaches investment estimates, expected returns, and PPP structures, and then publishes them to potential investors through investment promotion conferences, bilateral meetings, or investment promotion websites.
The assumption of this model is that the government provides projects and investors evaluate and bid on them. In reality, however, information asymmetry remains far from resolved. Government-published lists often contain only basic information such as project location and scale, lacking in-depth disclosure of key factors such as market demand, revenue forecasts, risk allocation, land acquisition status, and environmental assessment progress. A study of PPP projects worldwide shows that in more than 60% of failure or renegotiation cases, the root cause is not that the project itself is infeasible, but inadequate upstream preparation and unclear risk allocation.
More seriously, traditional promotion methods often equate "publication" with "marketing." A website, a PDF, or a roadshow cannot help investors complete the due diligence needed for decisions by their internal investment committees. For infrastructure assets of this kind—long-cycle and highly capital-intensive—what investors truly need is not "project opportunities" but "verified transaction proposals."
In addition, government departments often lack coordination. The agencies responsible for planning, finance, land, and the environment each act independently, leading to inconsistent project preparation progress, and many projects still have legal or title defects when brought to market. Together, these problems have created an industry-wide dilemma: large numbers of projects are repeatedly promoted, yet financing closings are repeatedly delayed.
Part Two: International Practice and Trends — From "Single Projects" to "Project Pipelines"The partnership between Odisha and IFC represents a new approach to addressing the aforementioned predicament. As the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, IFC's role is not simply to provide advice, but to help the government establish a comprehensive project preparation and transaction management system. According to public information, the two sides will cooperate to develop about 20 infrastructure projects, covering key areas such as transportation, urban services, and renewable energy. The focus is on "bankable" screening criteria—that is, a project must first pass financial model testing, legal due diligence, and risk assessment before it can be included in the promotion list.
This practice is not an isolated case globally. The Global Infrastructure Facility (GIF) under the World Bank specifically provides preparation funding and technical support for complex infrastructure projects in developing countries, helping governments cultivate projects into a "financeable" state. Similarly, the Asian Development Bank's (ADB) PPP Project Preparation Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank's infrastructure special initiatives, and Africa's InfraCo platform are all practicing the same logic: the starting point of project promotion is not roadshows, but front-end preparation.
Another trend worth noting is "centralized management of project pipelines." Some countries, such as India, Indonesia, and Ecuador, have established central or state-level PPP project databases and formulated unified norms for screening, evaluation, and publication. The PPP project database released by India's Ministry of Finance is a typical case. It requires all projects to pass the feasibility assessment of the "Viability Gap Fund" and provide standardized project information templates. This approach has effectively reduced investors' search costs and enhanced the government's credibility.
At the same time, international investors' attitudes toward infrastructure assets are also evolving. Over the past decade, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and infrastructure equity funds have shown a notably increased preference for long-term, stable cash flows. However, such investors generally lack the ability to develop projects from scratch in complex emerging markets; they prefer to step in when a project reaches an "investment-ready" state. This means that the targets of government infrastructure promotion are no longer just traditional construction contractors and operators, but also financial investors. And financial investors' requirements for project documentation and risk frameworks are far more stringent than those of engineering contractors.
Therefore, international best practices increasingly emphasize the specialization of "project preparation." Many governments have begun to entrust international financial institutions, professional advisors, or project management companies with project preparation work, rather than relying entirely on regular civil servants. This introduction of external professional expertise is changing the talent structure and cost structure of infrastructure project promotion.
Part III: Methodological Framework and Practical Paths—A Five-Step Approach to Building a Bankable Project Pipeline
Combining the Odisha case and the experience of major multilateral development banks around the world, we have distilled a five-step approach to "building a bankable project pipeline" for reference by investment promotion agencies. This is not a panacea, but a systematic engineering mindset.
Step 1: Strategic Project Screening### Step 1: Strategic Project Screening
Not all planned projects are suitable for PPP. Screening criteria should include: a clear revenue mechanism (such as tolls, availability payments, or regulated assets), a predictable demand curve, the necessity and appropriateness of government fiscal support, and political priority. One of the key actions in Odisha's cooperation with IFC was screening out about 20 commercially viable projects from a large pool of plans—which in itself was an exercise in "trade-offs." Investment promotion agencies should not act as "project mouthpieces," but rather as "project filters."
Step 2: Pre-Feasibility Assessment for Bankability
Before a project is officially launched, a pre-assessment should be conducted from the perspective of banks and investors. Core questions include: Can the project company's expected cash flows cover interest and principal? How will exchange rate and inflation risks be hedged? Is the minimum revenue guarantee too heavy? Is the exit mechanism clear? This stage usually requires hiring financial advisors with infrastructure financing experience. A bankability pre-assessment will expose many issues that are not visible on paper, such as overly optimistic demand assumptions or neglected allocation of responsibilities commonly found in tender documents.
Step 3: Transaction Structure and Risk Allocation Design
One of the main causes of infrastructure project failure is improper risk allocation. Governments often wish to transfer all risks to the private sector, but the sound allocation principle is to "let the party most capable of managing the risk bear it." For example, policy risks and exchange rate risks should be borne more by the government, while construction cost overrun risks should be assigned to contractors. This step is also key to building trust between the government and investors. In the case of Odisha, IFC's involvement helped introduce an internationally accepted risk allocation framework, making the project structure more acceptable to international investors.
Step 4: Market Testing and Investor Outreach
Before formal tendering, conducting market testing ("testing the waters") is highly necessary. Feedback on the structural design can be solicited from potential investors through market dialogue sessions, non-binding expressions of interest, industry symposiums, and other means. International multilateral development banks often use the so-called "capacity building with market communication" approach to help governments understand investors' preferences for specific asset classes in advance. Odisha's project promotion is also expected to follow this approach, leveraging IFC's international network to convey project information to global infrastructure investors.
Step 5: Transparent Governance and Continuous Updates
Establishing a public database of the project pipeline and regularly publishing project preparation progress, key documents, and decision-making rationale is the foundation of enhancing project credibility. Investors are highly sensitive to the credibility and symmetry of information. A government website that never updates project progress will quickly be labeled "unreliable" by the investment community. If Odisha can, with IFC's assistance, develop a standardized information disclosure process in the future, it will significantly reduce financing costs.
These five steps are not in a linear relationship but are iterative and cyclical. Many projects may be rejected at the pre-assessment stage, thereby avoiding subsequent waste. More importantly, the core of this methodology is not to "promote more projects," but to "promote fewer wrong projects."
Part 4: New Directions Worth Watching## Part Four: New Directions Worth Attention
Looking ahead, infrastructure project promotion will also be profoundly influenced by several new factors.
First is the involvement of artificial intelligence and data tools. AI can help governments rapidly scan vast amounts of project data to identify potential financing risks; it can also be used to intelligently match investor preferences with project characteristics and deliver project documents with precision. Some international organizations have already begun experimenting with natural language processing technology to parse PPP contracts and project documents, assisting investors in their due diligence.
Second is the global infrastructure competition triggered by geopolitics. China's Belt and Road Initiative, the G7's Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), and the EU's Global Gateway are all reshaping the direction and standards of infrastructure investment. For developing countries situated at the intersection of these initiatives, learning how to leverage the guarantees and standards of international financial institutions to make their domestic projects compliant with the requirements of different investors will become a mandatory course in project promotion.
Third, ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) standards are redefining "bankability." More and more investors are incorporating climate change risks, community impact, and gender equality into project assessments. If governments can embed an ESG framework at the preliminary preparation stage when promoting projects, they will undoubtedly broaden their investor base. For example, water and resilience infrastructure projects are becoming highly attractive due to climate adaptation needs.
Finally, the organizational capacity for project promotion also needs to be upgraded. Just as Odisha chose IFC as its technical and financial advisor, more governments will stop trying to handle everything in-house and instead bring in multilateral development banks, specialized advisors, and project management agencies to form a joint promotion team of "government plus professional institutions." This shift in organizational form may replace the traditional model of "investment promotion agencies fighting alone."
Conclusion
The cooperation between Odisha and IFC is an event that appears ordinary yet carries symbolic significance. It reminds us that infrastructure project promotion has long moved beyond the crude era of "publishing lists of projects seeking investment." A truly effective promotion system should, like an asset manager, take responsibility for every step of a project's journey—from incubation and cultivation to transaction.
For investment promotion agencies, this is both a challenge and an opportunity for capability upgrading. The challenge lies in the fact that their teams need to master financial modeling, legal frameworks, and investor psychology, rather than merely holding land and planning information. The opportunity lies in the fact that those agencies that first learn to systematically build pipelines of bankable projects will seize the initiative in the global contest for infrastructure investment.
Infrastructure is a long-term endeavor, and so is project promotion. Whoever can transform projects from "names on paper" into "assets in the eyes of investors" will earn a place in global capital flows.