THERE is a moment on every major infrastructure project in this country that everyone in the room privately dreads, but nobody says out loud. The ceremony is over. The officials have gone. And somewhere in a project office, an engineer is staring at a plan of the corridor and realizing that the land has not been acquired, the utilities have not been moved, and several thousand families are still living exactly where the pile driving equipment needs to go.
Some of our most significant national infrastructure investments — rail lines, expressways, urban transit systems — are running years behind schedule. The combined value of delayed programs runs into trillions of pesos. In most cases, the delays do not trace back to engineering failure or poor contractor performance. They trace back to something more fundamental: The conditions that any contractor needs to actually build something were not in place before the contracts were signed.
This is not a uniquely Filipino problem. The Americans spent $14.8 billion on Boston’s Big Dig — nearly six times the original estimate — largely because 30,000 unrecorded utility crossings were discovered only after construction was under way. Berlin Brandenburg Airport opened nine years late because residents had not been relocated before work began. These are standard case studies in every infrastructure program management course in the world.
The stakes are higher than we admit
One of the most clarifying frameworks I have encountered on this subject comes from Richard Vietor’s “How Countries Compete,” which Professor Vietor himself brought to life when I had the opportunity to study under him at the Harvard Business School Advanced Management Program. His argument is straightforward but consequential: in a globalized world, countries compete for exports, for foreign direct investment, for technology and for managerial know-how. Government strategy — whether explicit or implicit, is the vehicle through which nations create the conditions that attract these resources. But strategy alone is not sufficient. Nations need an organizational structure that can implement it. When the two are aligned, development compounds. When there is a mismatch (or when the context changes abruptly) nations can run into serious difficulties that alter the trajectory of development for decades.
The Philippines has an infrastructure development agenda that is ambitious in scale and backed by multilateral financing. The National Economic and Development Authority has initially approved 197 infrastructure flagship projects with the government allocating approximately $26 billion to infrastructure annually, roughly 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). But a development strategy is only as strong as its implementation architecture. And right now, that architecture has a structural weakness: We are consistently signing contracts before the ground is ready. As Vietor might frame it, “Preparing our nation to compete is a goal that all of us can share.” But preparation means sequencing and doing the unglamorous work before you invite a contractor to mobilize.
Infrastructure delay is like an economic wound that compounds. The World Bank has estimated that transport infrastructure disruptions cost economies across 137 countries approximately $107 billion annually. A 2025 analysis by the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure projected that the Philippines could face average annual economic losses of approximately 10.1 percent of GDP from 2025 to 2050, in part because infrastructure that should have been built or climate-proofed has been repeatedly deferred. Delayed infrastructure suppresses foreign direct investment, widens the current account deficit, feeds inflation through constrained logistics, and deepens the fiscal deficit through escalation costs and remediation the original budget never anticipated. A rail line that opens five years late does not simply deliver its benefits five years later, it loses five years of compounding returns that can never be fully recovered.
The lesson from countries like South Korea, India and Indonesia is that right-of-way clearance must be a precondition for contract award, not a concurrent workstream. Each country enacted legislation that time-bounded compensation disputes, separated site possession from final valuation and pre-funded acquisition so budget cycles could not stall it. The Philippines has the legal architecture — the right-of-way law exists — but lacks the institutional discipline to enforce readiness before contracts are signed. The fix is not a new law. It is the political will to make an existing requirement mandatory.
What it would take
In the industry, advance enabling works contracts are one of the mechanisms to counter these delays. It is not a novel concept nor is it experimental. It is about disciplined sequencing — applied before the main contractor ever sets foot on the site. What the programs that deliver on time-share — the Sydney Metro in Australia, the Thames Tideway Tunnel in London, or MRT extensions in Singapore — is that the land is secured, the utilities are moved, and the affected communities have somewhere to go before a single piece of equipment is mobilized.
The contract signed at a ceremony is not the beginning of the work. It is the end of a preparation phase. If that phase has not happened, no amount of political commitment will make a pile driver productive on day one.
Why doesn’t it seem to happen here? Part of the answer is political — a groundbreaking is visible, a three-year enabling works phase is not. Part of it is also structural. Project approvals are built around financial viability, not physical readiness, so a project can clear every government process and still go to market with a site no one can build on. Part of it is financial. Infrastructure budgets inside the annual appropriations cycle are exposed to competing priorities every year, making multiyear enabling programs hard to protect.
Indonesia and India both ran into land acquisition bottlenecks that stalled major projects for years after financial close. Both eventually reformed their preconstruction frameworks, making right-of-way clearance a prerequisite for contract award. The reforms changed delivery outcomes.
What it would take here is similarly practical: a dedicated-enabling work function empowered to coordinate across agencies; a binding requirement that right-of-way acquisition, resettlement and utility diversions reach a certified threshold before any main contract goes to tender; and a conversation with development finance partners about funding enabling works as a stand-alone preconstruction phase, separate from the main civil works financing.
The point Vietor makes about competitive strategy applies in this context. Countries that cannot credibly deliver what they promise become progressively less attractive to the capital, technology, investments and expertise that drive development. The investor who prices in a five-year delay does not wait — they choose Vietnam, or Indonesia, or whichever market can credibly deliver. That choice compounds, year after year, into a widening gap in productive capacity and economic trajectory.
The ground is there. Let’s make sure it’s ready before we break it.
