Betuweroute, a freight railway that missed its operating promise

• The Delta Programme and its fund

  The Netherlands legislated a standing programme against flooding and fresh-water shortage, run by an independent Delta Commissioner and paid from a dedicated Delta Fund that expects 27.4 billion euros to be available through 2050.

• Groningen gas system, and its closure after induced earthquakes

  The Netherlands ended roughly sixty years of Groningen gas extraction with the permanent closure of all production locations on 19 April 2024; by the end of 2024 the response system had handled more than 500,000 damage reports and paid over €2.5 billion in compensation.

• Room for the River, flood safety delivered across the Rhine branches

  The Netherlands ran Room for the River from 2006 to 2019, delivering 39 measures at 34 locations along the IJssel, Waal, Nederrijn and Lek for about four million residents at a total cost of €2.3 billion.

• Childcare benefits administration, and the recovery after institutional failure

  The Netherlands' tax administration put tens of thousands of childcare-benefits parents into debt between 2004 and 2019; by February 2026 the recovery operation had recognized more than 43,000 parents as harmed among about 69,000 applicants and guaranteed each recognized parent at least €30,000.

• DigiD, a shared digital identity rail for public services

  The Netherlands has run DigiD as a shared login for public services since 2005; in 2024 it recorded 550,153,271 successful authentications across 16,829,696 accounts and reported 99.94 percent availability against a 99.5 percent norm.

• Social and Economic Council, the institutionalised polder bargain

  The Netherlands established the Social and Economic Council (SER) by law in 1950, giving employers, trade unions and independent Crown-appointed experts a standing forum for social and economic policy; the current council has 36 members and collective agreements cover more than 84 percent of employees.

• National Police, one corps from twenty-five regional forces

  On 1 January 2013 the Netherlands merged 25 autonomous regional police corps and the national KLPD into one organisation with ten regional units, a national unit and a shared Police Services Centre, centralising specialist capacity while retaining local teams.

• NL-Alert, a tested multi-channel emergency warning system

  The Netherlands tests NL-Alert twice a year and, in the 1 December 2025 national test, 92 percent of residents aged 12 and over said they received the message on their mobile phone; 90 percent received it only on that channel and 2 percent received it on mobile plus public digital signs.

• Delta Works, a 43-year national flood-defence programme

  After the 1953 flood, the Netherlands built 13 Delta Works between the first project in 1954 and the completion of the Maeslant Barrier in 1997, creating a long-lived national defence system of dams, sluices and storm-surge barriers.

• Top Sectors and mission-driven innovation policy

  In November 2023 the Netherlands renewed its mission-driven innovation compact: businesses, knowledge institutions, governments and other organisations committed an estimated €5.7 billion a year, coordinated through five missions and eight Knowledge and Innovation Agendas.

• MijnOverheid, a shared citizen mailbox and data portal

  The Netherlands runs MijnOverheid as one portal for government mail and personal data; in 2024 it carried 103,429,342 messages through 11,015,895 accounts with reported availability of 99.99 percent against a 99 percent norm.

• iDEAL, interoperable online payments through Dutch banks

  The Netherlands built iDEAL as a shared bank-connected online payment rail; in 2024 it processed 1.47 billion payments worth €141 billion, almost matching the €147 billion spent through debit cards at the point of sale.

• Fyra V250, a high-speed service withdrawn after a failed launch

  The V250 trains for the Netherlands–Belgium Fyra service entered operation six years late and the service was cancelled after only 40 days, leaving the intended passenger service on the HSL-Zuid unrealised and triggering a parliamentary inquiry.

• DigiD Machtigen, delegated access to public services

  The Netherlands built delegated authority into its public-service login so a family member, carer or adviser can act for someone else without taking their password; in 2024 DigiD Machtigen handled 15,563,897 queries from 798 connected services at 99.84 percent availability against a 99.5 percent norm.

• eHerkenning, a public-private business identity framework

  The Netherlands developed eHerkenning with commercial identity providers so businesses could use one trusted login across public services; in 2024 the framework recorded 1,140,751 authentication means and 639 connected organisations.

• Digipoort, an electronic post office for government–business data

  The Netherlands runs Digipoort as a central gateway that receives, validates and routes secure messages between businesses and public agencies; in 2024 it handled 75,433,353 messages, including a channel with 3,075 connected organisations for financial and social reporting.

• DigiNotar, a certificate breach that forced a trust-chain reset

  The Netherlands ended DigiNotar's PKIoverheid service after the 2011 breach generated at least 531 forged certificates; 333 could be revoked and the government tightened certificate requirements, role division and supervision after the incident.

• OVpay, nationwide contactless transit payments

  Translink and the Dutch public-transport operators rolled out OVpay nationwide in 2023, embedding bank-card and mobile check-in across the country; in 2024 the system processed 390 million travel transactions, 15 percent of all transit transactions.

• Omgevingswet and the Digital Environment System

  On 1 January 2024 the Netherlands put the Omgevingswet and its Digital Environment System into operation, joining municipalities, provinces, water boards and the national government behind one Omgevingsloket for rules, maps and permit applications.

• Programmatic Approach to Nitrogen, and the permitting reversal

  The Netherlands operated the Programmatic Approach to Nitrogen (PAS) from July 2015 until the Council of State invalidated its legal basis in May 2019; by the end of 2023, 2,557 affected PAS reporters had sought permits and only 115 had a recorded solution.

Every delivery from Netherlands

• Pix instant payment system

  Brazil's central bank specified, built and ran a mandatory instant payment rail that settled 7.98 billion transactions in July 2026, for 152 million people and 14 million firms transacting in that month.

• GOV.BR federal identity and service platform

  Brazil consolidated federal public services behind one identity platform, reporting 175 million active accounts and 5,179 digital services in May 2026.

• X-Road national data exchange layer

  Estonia has run one data exchange layer for the whole state since 2001, and in July 2026 it carried 374.9 million queries between 1,000 connected organizations, 251 of them government bodies, across 3,785 services.

• Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana bank accounts

  India opened 590.9 million basic bank accounts through existing banks from 2014, holding 3.17 lakh crore rupees in deposits as of 19 August 2026.

• Electricity supply rebuilt on renewable sources

  Uruguay rebuilt its electricity supply between 2010 and 2017 through public tenders and long-term contracts, and in 2025 fossil fuels produced 293 GWh of the 15,855 GWh generated, so 98.2 percent came from hydro, wind, biomass and solar.

• Plan Ceibal, one connected laptop per child

  Uruguay gave a connected laptop to every child in public primary school from 2007, the first country to do it nationally, and the household survey found a Ceibal computer in the homes of 35.8 percent of the population in 2018.

• Sistema Unico de Saude, universal public health system

  Brazil wrote a right to health into the 1988 constitution and built a single public system that covers everybody in the country, and the WHO service coverage index for Brazil rose from 71 in 2000 to 84 in 2023.

• Programa Nacional de Imunizacoes, and its erosion

  Brazil's national immunisation programme reached 99 percent DPT coverage in 2003 and held above 95 percent for a decade, then fell to 68 percent by 2021 and had recovered to 91 percent by 2024.

• Luz para Todos, rural electrification

  Brazil connected the last rural households to electricity through a national programme run with the state and private distributors, taking access from 94.4 percent of the population in 2000 to 99.8 percent in 2024.

• Bolsa Familia and the single registry behind it

  Brazil built one national registry of low-income households and paid conditional transfers through it, going from 6.6 million benefits in December 2004 to a peak of 21.0 million in 2022 and 18.6 million in December 2025.

• Fully electronic national elections

  Brazil has run every election on electronic voting machines since 2000, across an electorate that reached 155.9 million voters in 2024, with results published the same evening.

• Deepwater and pre-salt oil production

  Brazil developed deepwater extraction, found the pre-salt fields in 2006 and produced them at depths of more than 5,000 metres, with national oil production rising from 71,844 thousand cubic metres in 2000 to 219,032 in 2025.

• Seguro Popular, and its abolition

  Mexico built public health insurance for people outside social security from 2003 and abolished it in 2020, and CONEVAL measured the share of the population without access to health services rising from 16.2 percent in 2018 to 39.1 percent in 2022.

• Sure Start children's centres, and their erosion

  England built a national network of early-childhood centres reaching 3,632 sites by August 2009, then closed or hollowed out a large part of it after funding was cut, with the official count at 3,123 by October 2017 and independent estimates near 1,000 closures.

• Grid power, and load shedding

  South Africa ran one of the world's cheapest reliable grids and extended it to most of the population after 1994, then under-invested and lost the surplus, reaching 335 days of load shedding in 2023 before recovering to 83 days in 2024.

• Measles elimination, and its erosion

  The United States eliminated endemic measles transmission by 2000 through school-entry vaccination requirements, and falling coverage brought 2,777 confirmed cases by August 2026, the most since 1991, against 285 in all of 2024.

• BNDES, the national development bank

  Founded in 1952, Brazil's federal development bank provides long-term financing and investment across the national economy, and it disbursed R$169.7 billion in 2025.

• Casa da Moeda do Brasil, the national mint

  Founded in 1694, Brazil's national mint has remained a public institution through colonial, imperial and republican regimes and now produces currency, identity documents and passports after more than 330 years of operation.

• Housing and Development Board, public housing at scale

  Singapore set up the Housing and Development Board in 1960 to address a severe housing shortage, and it built more than 21,000 flats within its first three years.

• AFE passenger rail and network contraction

  Uruguay's state railway suspended passenger service in January 1988 to focus on freight; by 1990 about half of the national network had been declared non-operational, leaving 1,484 kilometres active from a 2,998-kilometre network, before passenger services returned only partially in 1993.

• Flamanville 3 EPR, and the erosion of nuclear new-build delivery

  France's Flamanville 3 EPR took about 16.5 years from construction beginning in September 2007 to completion in early 2024, and its commissioning was the country's first new nuclear reactor since Civaux 2 in 1999, a 25-year gap.

• Phoenix pay system, and its prolonged failure

  Canada rolled out the Phoenix federal pay system in 2016, then spent more than C$2.6 billion by April 2022 to support and stabilise it and correct pay-file errors, with a further roughly C$1 billion allocated through the 2024-25 fiscal year.

• Transantiago, an integrated transport reform with rising subsidy dependence

  Chile launched the integrated Transantiago bus–metro system in 2007; an independent 2016–19 evaluation found the state subsidy per passenger fare rose from CLP 640 per CLP 1,000 paid in 2016 to CLP 790 in 2019 even as passenger production rose 7%.

• 4G road concessions, a national infrastructure portfolio

  By September 2024, Colombia's 4G road programme comprised 30 concessions at 86.99% aggregate progress, with 14 in operation, 13 under construction, two in pre-construction and one in early termination.

• Reficar, a refinery modernization with a fiscal-liability finding

  A 2021 Contraloría fiscal-responsibility ruling on Colombia's Reficar modernization held COP2.945 trillion in damage after finding USD997 million in additional investments that added no value to the project.

• GIGA School, one learning device per student

  Japan's MEXT GIGA School programme reached a one-device-per-student environment in 1,810 of 1,812 local school authorities (99.9%) by the end of fiscal 2022, with the remaining two scheduled to finish during fiscal 2023.

• Monju, a fast-breeder programme ended before commercial operation

  Japan decided in December 2016 not to restart the Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor and moved to decommissioning after a 1995 sodium leak, a 2010 restart followed by equipment trouble and 2012 inspection failures; the approved plan targets roughly 30 years of decommissioning.

• Invierte.pe, a national multi-year investment-management system

  Peru's Invierte.pe system tracks public investment across national, regional and local governments; by 25 July 2024 the three levels had executed S/25.939 billion of a S/67.797 billion investment budget, a reported 38.3% advance.

• Reconstrucción con Cambios, a delayed recovery portfolio

  A 2023 Contraloría control report found the education portfolio of Peru's Reconstrucción con Cambios programme at 36.6% implementation by July 2023 against a 78% milestone expected in the earlier baseline, with the corresponding target date already expired.

• ICE and a mostly renewable national electricity system

  Costa Rica's integrated electricity system generated 89.4% of its electricity from renewable sources in 2024, while ICE reported electrical coverage reaching 98.7% of households despite one of the country's driest years on record.

• CCSS universal health-insurance reach

  Costa Rica's Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social reported health-insurance coverage of 92.92% of the national population in 2024, using household-survey and administrative records to include contributors, dependents, pensioners and state-covered households.

• Metro de Quito, a cross-administration urban rail delivery

  Quito opened the first line of its metro in December 2023 after a multi-administration build, and the operator reported more than 54 million passenger trips during 2024 with uninterrupted service.

• Panama Canal expansion and self-financing operations

  After the third set of locks opened in 2016, the Panama Canal Authority handled 9,944 deep-draft transits and 423 million tonnes of cargo in fiscal year 2024, reporting B/.4.986 billion in total revenue despite climate constraints.

• Metro de Panamá network operations

  Panama's public metro network, inaugurated in 2014 and expanded with Line 2, transported 118,351,007 passengers in the twelve-month operating period reported in its 2024 institutional memory.

• Mi Teleférico urban cable-car network

  Bolivia's Mi Teleférico network carried 78,715,401 passenger trips in 2024; its management report compared that result with a 97.7 million annual volume required for budget balance, or roughly 80% of the target while the system remained in service.

• Industrial lithium carbonate plant below design capacity

  Bolivia's state lithium company doubled lithium-carbonate output to 2,064 tonnes in 2024 after its industrial plant began operating, but the Ministry of Economy reported that technical problems with evaporation ponds and the water-treatment plant kept production below the project's projected capacity of 15,000 tonnes a year.

• Itaipú binational hydropower operations

  Itaipú supplied Paraguay's grid with 20,383 GWh in 2024, 4.5% more than in 2023, while the binational plant generated 67,089 GWh in total and continued operating after four decades of service.

• Metrobús, an unfinished bus rapid transit project

  Paraguay's planned Asunción Metrobús corridor ended with an incomplete and unviable works package: in April 2024 the Public Prosecutor's Office said the state had paid certificates for works that did not meet the programme's purpose and alleged a G.180.03 billion patrimonial loss.

• ARSAT-3 satellite programme suspended before launch

  Argentina's government review found that the ARSAT-3 construction programme, approved in 2015 with a 2019 launch plan, was suspended in 2016–17; the unbuilt satellite forced two later orbital-protection operations and left the original nationwide broadband objective undelivered.

• DPWH national infrastructure delivery and transparency portal

  The Philippine Department of Public Works and Highways' live transparency portal records 209,419 completed contracts and 997 terminated contracts out of 258,645 contracts from 2016 to 2026, against ₱6.4 trillion of listed investment.

• Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, a mothballed megaproject

  The Philippine Department of Energy's 2017 annual report describes the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant as mothballed and records its reassessment as part of a proposed national nuclear programme, after the original plant failed to become an operating power asset.

• Trans-Sumatra toll-road programme, still short of its planned network

  Indonesia's public-works ministry reported in January 2024 that the Trans-Sumatra toll-road programme had 596 kilometres operating against a 2,749-kilometre planned network, with another 361 kilometres under construction and later phases still in planning.

• National expressway build-out in 2024

  Vietnam's Ministry of Transport reported that seven road projects were completed and opened in 2024, bringing the national expressway network to more than 2,021 kilometres.

• Cat Linh–Ha Dong metro, a delayed and over-budget delivery

  Vietnam's State Audit reported in 2019 that the Cat Linh–Ha Dong metro's approved investment had risen from VND8,700 billion to VND18,000 billion and that a line originally due in November 2013 was still unfinished after repeated schedule changes.

• MRT Putrajaya Line

  Malaysia completed and opened the 57.7-kilometre MRT Putrajaya Line in two phases, with 36 operational stations serving a corridor of about two million people; full operations began on 16 March 2023.

• Kuala Lumpur–Singapore high-speed rail, terminated before construction

  Malaysia allowed the bilateral Kuala Lumpur–Singapore high-speed rail agreement to terminate on 31 December 2020 after repeated suspensions and paid Singapore SGD102,815,576 in March 2021 for verified development and suspension costs.

• Hopewell elevated road-and-rail concession, and its termination

  Thailand approved Hopewell's 60-kilometre Bangkok Elevated Road and Train System concession in 1991, but work stalled at 14 percent completion for more than nine months during the 1997 property-market collapse and the government terminated the concession in spring 1998.

• AVE high-speed rail network

  Spain expanded high-speed rail from the first Madrid–Seville line in 1992 to more than 4,000 kilometres of high-speed track by 2024; the Transport Ministry reported that the service reached 70 percent of the population.

• Castor underground gas storage, and its closure

  Spain extinguished the Castor underground gas-storage concession in October 2014 after seismic events halted operation; the state transferred administration to Enagás and the decree recognised €1.350729 billion in compensation for the former concessionaire, with recovery structured over 30 years.

• Ostrołęka C coal block, and its abandonment

  Poland began the 1,000-MW Ostrołęka C coal-block project in 2018 without full financing, suspended construction in 2020 and demolished the built elements in 2021; the Supreme Audit Office later found that the unfinished investment consumed more than PLN1.5 billion.

• Nya Karolinska Solna public–private hospital project

  Stockholm delivered Nya Karolinska Solna through a 30-year public–private partnership: the official inquiry reports SEK 22.8 billion for construction and equipment, a projected SEK 57 billion total through 2040 including operation and maintenance, and an external comparison that found construction 53% more expensive per square metre than Scandinavian hospitals.

• Barsebäck nuclear plant closure and decommissioning

  Sweden permanently shut Barsebäck 1 in 1999 and Barsebäck 2 in 2005; the national nuclear-safety report lists each reactor at 615 MWe and records the site as undergoing decommissioning, a 1,230-MWe asset retirement completed by political decision rather than construction failure.

• New Children's Hospital cost escalation

  Ireland's New Children's Hospital project saw its approved budget rise from €1.73 billion to €2.24 billion by February 2024 after an independent review recorded €450 million of earlier escalation and weaknesses in set-up, planning, execution and governance.

• Rural electrification and near-universal grid coverage

  Nicaragua's Ministry of Energy and Mines reported national electricity coverage of 99.575% in December 2024 after public electrification projects brought power to 732,427 homes and 3,853,005 people.

• Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela's five-million-home milestone

  Venezuela's Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela reported delivery of its five-millionth home on 7 June 2024, with the programme saying that community self-construction supplied 75% of its construction in the preceding four years.

Every delivery under building