Road Asset Management and the Policy Gap Asia-Pacific Cannot Afford

By Adwait Limaye | IRF Young Professional Programme Leader and Transport Policy and Data Specialist, Asian Transport Observatory (ATO)

I am a sustainable transport specialist working across Asia-Pacific, where much of my time is spent investigating what national policies say and what data reveals about where attention and investment actually flow. This article focuses on one such gap that I believe deserves far more of both than it currently receives.

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Across many countries in Asia-Pacific, a new road connectivity corridor gets announced. Ribbon-cutting gets celebrated. Network expansion figures get cited as evidence of progress in ministerial speeches and multilateral dialogues alike. What rarely features in those conversations is the condition of what was already built.

Whether the roads are holding. Whether the communities they were designed to serve can still reach them: in the monsoon, in the dry season, a decade on. Expansion and maintenance are not competing priorities. They are two halves of the same responsibility. And right now, one half is being quietly ignored.

Neglecting road asset maintenance is not a technical oversight. It is a policy choice, and the Asia Pacific region is paying a heavy price for it.

A Gap Written in Asphalt

“Spend a dollar maintaining a road today or spend four to five rebuilding it tomorrow” (van Dissel & Anyala, 2024). I first encountered this message at the Asia-Pacific Transport Forum 2025, where it was put forward not as a theory but as an operational reality, one, the room largely already knew, yet somehow had not quite reckoned with.

It is grounded in how pavements actually fail: non-linearly, and faster than most budgets anticipate. Routine resurfacing, drainage upkeep, periodic structural repairs, deferred by even a few seasons, can push a road past the point of rehabilitation. At that stage, reconstruction remains the only option.

Road contracts tell part of this story. Most road construction contracts carry a defect liability period, typically between five and ten years, during which the contractor retains responsibility for the asset’s condition. When that period ends and ownership transfers to the government, the road enters a new phase, one where its future depends entirely on the next budget cycle. That transition, quiet and largely unremarked, is often where the maintenance gap begins.

The Asian Development Bank (van Dissel & Anyala, 2024) tracks the scale of that gap across Asia-Pacific. Countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia, Mongolia, Nepal, and Pakistan are spending between 0.1 and 0.6 percent of GDP on road maintenance, against an estimated need of 0.5 to 1.3 percent. Road investment in the region, by contrast, is projected to represent close to one percent of annual GDP through 2035 (Asian Transport Observatory, 2026b).

What this tells is that road network is being expanded faster than it is being kept; and in some cases, by an order of magnitude.

The climate dimension sharpens this further. Asia-Pacific accounts for more than 60 percent (Koks et al., 2023) of global annual damages from climate change and natural hazards, despite housing less than 40 percent (Asian Transport Observatory and Life-Links, 2025) of the world’s transport infrastructure, with road networks bearing the majority of those losses (CDRI, n.d.). In such a context, the value of maintenance extends well beyond preserving asset condition.

A well-maintained road sustains lower hazard damage in the first place, preserving continuity of service for communities that have no fallback. Resilience may reveal itself after a disaster, but it is built before one.

What Policies Do Not Say

In development finance, what gets named in a national strategy or a climate policy is what gets funded. Road asset management, with measurable condition targets and maintenance commitments, is not systematically reflected in these documents across Asia-Pacific (Asian Transport Observatory, 2026a).

Having watched how policy language translates, or fails to translate, into investment across the region, I have come to believe this absence is not incidental.

The funding gap is real. But it begins as a policy gap. The reason this matters so directly is what might be called indicator lock-in. Embedding an asset condition target, a maintenance budget ratio, or a share of good-quality roads into a national strategy or a climate policy creates the reference point that development finance institutions use when assessing investment readiness.

Without that reference point, maintenance simply does not make the cut. Analysis of Nationally Determined Contributions and Long-Term Strategies¹ across the Asia-Pacific region (SLOCAT and GIZ, n.d.) shows just how wide that gap remains. Only around one in three countries includes broad road resilience-related measures in these documents at all.

Just five percent contain specific repair and maintenance policy measures. In a region absorbing a disproportionate share of global climate losses, the language of maintenance is almost entirely absent from the very commitments designed to attract climate finance by signalling national ambition.

Some countries are beginning to move (Asian Transport Observatory, 2026a). Cambodia’s NDC commits to 5,000 kilometres of roads repaired to climate-proofing standards by 2035. Papua New Guinea’s National Roads Network Strategy 2036 sets condition targets across its entire network with explicit budget provisions for routine and periodic maintenance. China’s 14th Five-Year Plan details pavement recycling rates exceeding 95 percent on expressways. These are meaningful signals. But they remain exceptions, and the norm across the region is still silence.

The Human Price

A degraded road has a cost that never appears in any budget line. It is a pregnant woman who cannot reach a hospital because the rural route is impassable in monsoon season. A child who arrives late to school, or does not go at all. A labourer who loses a day’s income because the road is gone.

These are not illustrations. Across much of the Asia-Pacific region, they are realities, ones I have encountered long before they showed up in a dataset. They accumulate quietly, season after season, in ways that compound across entire economies. The difference between a well-maintained network and a neglected one is not a matter of degree. It is a matter of whether infrastructure serves people or merely occupies space.

When maintenance is written into national strategies, embedded in climate policies, and discussed with the same seriousness as new construction, the prioritisation tends to follow. Not as a theory of change, but as a simple truth about how policy systems translate into funding pipelines. The knowledge is there.

The framework exists. Performance-based maintenance contracting, systematic asset condition monitoring, road roughness indices as planning tools: none of this is

None of this has to start from scratch. The Asian Transport Observatory (2026a) tracks a comprehensive set of indicators on road investment, policy commitments, and asset conditions across the region, giving governments and financiers a clearer picture of where the gaps are and what others are doing. ADB’s Green Roads Toolkit (2024), developed to guide governments and project teams in planning and preparing road investments that embed sustainability and asset management from the outset, offers one such entry point. These efforts matter. But they can only go so far without the policy foundations that make maintenance a named, funded, and accountable priority. That part still needs to be written.

The Questions Worth Asking

A kilometre built and left to deteriorate is not progress. It is a liability deferred. In Asia-Pacific, a region already disproportionately exposed to climate risk, the communities depending on that road rarely have an alternative.

The transport community already knows the stitch-in-time argument. What concerns me, having watched policy cycles and investment decisions unfold across the region, is how rarely that knowledge finds its way into the documents that actually govern what gets built, maintained, and funded.

Is road asset management named in your country’s NDC? Does your national transport strategy look beyond the ribbon-cutting? Has preventive maintenance ever been treated as an investment rather than a cost? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the ones I find myself returning to. And they will determine what Asia-Pacific’s road network looks like in 2035. And who it can still reach.

Footnote

1. 
   NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) and LTSs (Long-Term Strategies) are core national climate plans under the Paris Agreement used to tackle global warming. NDCs outline short-to-medium-term actions and 5-year emission targets, while LTSs provide a comprehensive, multi-decade roadmap toward net-zero emissions. (United Nations, n.d.)  ↩︎

References

Asian Development Bank. (2024). Green Roads Tool Kit | ADB Data Library. https://data.adb.org/dataset/green-roads-toolkit

Asian Transport Observatory. (2026a). ATO Green Roads Profiles. https://asiantransportobservatory.org/analytical-outputs/greenroadsprofiles/

Asian Transport Observatory. (2026b, May 18). Asian Transport 2035 Outlook: Investment Needs of Low and Middle-Income Economies. Asian Transport Observatory. https://asiantransportobservatory.org/analytical-outputs/asia-lmic-transport-outlook-investment-needs/

Asian Transport Observatory and Life-Links. (2025). From Breakdowns to Breakthroughs: Climate Resilience of Asia-Pacific’s Transport Infrastructure. https://asiantransportobservatory.org/analytical-outputs/transport-asia-resilience/

CDRI. (n.d.). Homepage | GIRI. Retrieved June 23, 2026, from https://giri.unepgrid.ch/ Koks, E., Rozenberg, J., Tariverdi, M., Dickens, B., Fox, C., van Ginkel, K., & Hallegatte, S. (2023). A global assessment of national road network vulnerability. Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability, 3(2), 025008. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2634-4505/acd1aa

SLOCAT and GIZ. (n.d.). NDC Transport Tracker. Changing Transport. Retrieved June 23, 2026, from https://changing-transport.org/tracker/

United Nations. (n.d.). All About the NDCs. United Nations. United Nations. Retrieved June 23, 2026, from https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/all-about-ndcs

van Dissel, S. C., & Anyala, M. (2024). Road Maintenance Financing and Cost Recovery Options: The Future of Road User Revenues in Developing Asia and the Pacific. (100). https://www.adb.org/publications/road-maintenance-financing-cost-recovery-option