Indonesia mandated the Directorate General of Sea Transportation (DGST) to prepare a National Ports Master Plan (NPMP) by June 2010 as part of the country’s port reform efforts, however the first version of the plan failed to meet technical expectations. Accordingly, the Indonesia Infrastructure Initiative (IndII) sought assistance to reconstitute the plan in a manner that meets technical norms while rationalizing future port investment. They also retained Nathan to prepare the NPMP Decree and provide an activity design for future port development work.

Nathan prepared four background papers, including a Baseline Report, Traffic Forecasts, Investment Requirements, and a report on Institutional Development and Financing. The work began with a thorough review of previous port studies, relevant laws, decrees, regulations, and other documents and data in order to determine data collection needs. Nathan ensured the reports addressed all major commodity groups by trade flow (international, domestic, and transshipment), port zone, and specified investment requirements. These were based on rationalizing current port operations, estimating physical capacity of the terminals, and then identifying capacity requirements in view of future demand projections.

The analysis provided by Nathan formed the basis for investment decisions, strategies used for enhancing port performance, financing for port development, policy framework for facilitating sector development, governance of a competitive port system, institutional framework needed for executing policy, and appropriate allocation of port sector functional responsibilities. After reviewing the needs for the NPMP, including logistics and multimodal blueprints, input from local specialists, and any reports relative to connectivity, Nathan was able to ascertain general areas where new ports need to be developed in order to prepare an umbrella strategy for future individual port master plans based on the national policy. Our experts also reconstructed the cargo forecasts by mining unprocessed data available at DGST and generating forecasts and port development plans for Indonesia’s top 50 ports. Lastly, Nathan also formulated the NPMP Decree and prepared an Action Plan for next steps of NPMP implementation.