The Asian Environmental Conundrum

Philippe Bergeron

 Some of the information and data contained in this article are derived from The Asian Environmental Outlook 2001, ADB as well as Toward Clean Shared Growth in Asia, 2000 Greenleaf Publishing Ltd.

The Asian region occupies 23 percent of Earth’s land area and is today the home to 50 percent of its people. 1.2 billion people are Asian urbanites in cities that helped lift the Asia share of global output from roughly 10% in 1950 to 30% in 1995 and perhaps 60% by 2025. If the rate of future Asian growth is debatable, the direction of change is not. Looking at the sheer scale of the numbers, it is difficult not to see that the world’s environmental future will be determined by what happen in the rapidly industrialising economies of Asia.

The Asian economic vibrancy helped raise the GNP per capita at an average annual rate of 5.5% over the past 30 years, more than twice the rate in OECD countries. Behind such dynamism are tightly intertwined urban-industrial growth processes that heavily rely on intensive but unsustainable exploitation of natural resources in particular, energy, water, soil and land. This makes Asia the most complex environmental conundrum of this planet. Trying to summarize the underlying challenges and give a vision of the future ahead within a 16-pages article can only remain sketchy at best.

This article tries to address the following three groups of questions? Firstly what are the major Asian environmental difficulties especially those that are relevant to consulting engineers? Then how might Asia approach its complex sustainability challenges and what will be the resulting opportunities for engineering services? And finally how can consulting engineers sharpen their marketing edge in the face of changing Asian consulting market conditions?

At the outset it is possible to summarize the message underlying this article into a good and a bad news. The good news is that the prospects for consulting engineers in Asia have never been better. The critical need for Asian economies to reduce substantially the energy, materials, pollution and waste intensity of their activities to sustain future economic growth is compelling. It calls for enormous capacity building efforts especially in engineering and technological fields that can help train, plan, design, advice, test, measure, inspect and certify on a massive scale the efficiency of resources consumption in the region. The aim will be to reduce within perhaps a few generation, the intensity of natural resources use of urban and industrial activities to levels unprecedented today even in the most industrialised countries. With limited environmental management experience to build on across the region, the attitude of Asian decision-makers toward consulting services is therefore changing. Consulting engineers have long suffered in Asia from a negative perception of not being able to deliver the goods but rather to produce paper if not only waste paper. They are now increasingly welcomed to build a process of technical change and a culture of technology innovation that can help reconcile economic and environmental performance targets toward efficient cleaner industry and greener urban infrastructure.

The bad news on the other hand is that institutionally funded public infrastructure studies and engineering works, an important traditional segment of the consulting engineering business, may be breaking apart and melting away in Asia. Successful development processes have always been driven overwhelmingly by private capital in Asia. As of the mid of the 90s, public investment mostly in the form of development assistance constituted only 10% of capital flows to the region. The sobering experience of the not so distant Asian financial crisis has plunged many Asian government budgets in the red and lowered further the regional appetite for institutional development assistance. Multilateral financing institution such as the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank reflecting on past mixed results of their (government linked) lending practices are undergoing soul-searching exercises. Bilateral donor agencies from industrial countries, faced by growing demand for lean government at home and a growing availability and mobility of capital around the globe, are experiencing significant budgetary cut forcing them to rethink their development assistance strategies. The trend clearly is that private business and capital flow as well as private sector participation through various models of public/private partnerships for public infrastructure development and industrial resource efficiency is becoming the name of the engineering game in Asia. Without doubt, this is expected to profoundly affect how consulting engineering business is made in Asia from the need for wider and private-law oriented expertise, to innovative ways to structure and finance fees earning services up to the need for more proactive marketing and project acquisition strategies.

What are the most important sustainability challenge facing Asia? One can try to group them into four environmental sectors (Energy, Water, Agriculture-Forest & Biodiversity and Urbanisation-cum-Industrialisation) and three socio-economic dimensions (Poverty, Finance and Governance).

Energy. The mix of energy resource endowment of the region poses significant challenges. The PRC and India rely heavily on coal, a low environmental quality fuel. Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand use mostly oil; a second worst carbon intensive energy resource. Several poorest countries, like Bangladesh or Myanmar, still substantially rely on primary wood and biomass putting enormous pressure on local forest and ecosystems. Asia is predicted to overtake the OECD economies as the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide sometime between 2015 and 2020. Given the intricate relationship between energy use and economic development and the economic growth dynamic of the region, it is expected that Asia will sooner than many think, faces growing scarcity of conventional fuels. Initially oil then natural gas and eventually coal as well. The solution according to a recent report of ADB will be the need, much earlier than industrialised countries did at that stage of development, to decouple the use of energy from the production of goods and services. This will require bold policies in favour of energy efficiency, high quality fuels, full cost pricing and renewable energy. Asia is rich in renewable energy opportunities such as solar, wind and biomass. Expect therefore the region to spur massive research and technology development programmes in energy efficiency and renewable as soon as the oil splurge ends.

Water. The Asian region is suffering of a whole range of water-related problems. On the supply side some semi-arid countries like Pakistan are genuinely suffering from water scarcity. On the demand side more than 800 million people in Asia lack access to safe water and more than 2 Billion lack rudimentary sanitation services. These acute deprivations cause high rate of water-related diseases, impaired health for many and diminished standards of living for millions. Uncontrolled water pollution, unsustainable rate of exploitation and poor water resource management practice exacerbate shortage and contribute to intensified competition for water use between agriculture, cities and industry. In many densely populated coastal areas where most Asian megacities are located, the need to always look farther a field for water to quench roaring industrial and urban growth is creating chronic water shortage and constraining economic growth prospect. To alleviate water shortage, bold policies and institutional measures will be required including integrated watersheds management, regional water management plans along natural river basins beyond political boundaries, reformed property rights regimes of water resources, coastal zones management and intensive wastewater collection, treatment and recycling. To drive water efficiency on the supply and the demand side of water usage full cost pricing and privatisation of services (already appearing in several first- and second-tier Asian countries) will also need to be encouraged on a broad scale.

Agriculture, Forests, and Biodiversity. While seventeen mega-diversity nations hold two thirds of planet’s biological resources, six are in Asia. As much as 80 percent of the world’s endangered species is found in the region. One of every seven plant species in Sri Lanka is said to face extinction. The regional demand for agricultural land and the growing needs for commercial forest products are estimated to cause a 1 percent per year loss resulting in the lowest forest cover per capita in the world. While land conversion for agriculture compounded with agriculture intensification so far succeeded to maintain regional food security in spite of enormous population pressure, it was so far at a terrible environmental cost. Land degradation, erosion, salinisation, over-depletion of aquifer and chemicals pollution are widespread and still growing although Asia has already by far the lowest level of arable land per capita in the world. With total marine fish catches in the Pacific over their maximum potential and on the decline, aquaculture is the fastest growing food production sector in Asia. The PRC, India, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand together with Japan and Korea are the top seven producers in the world. Poor environmental management however causes erratic performance with widespread cases of loss of wetlands ecosystems, water and chemical pollution and diseases introduced by exotic species. Policies capable to help redress the Asian ecosystems imbalance include clarified and more equitable property rights, reduced market intervention, elimination of subsidies, science based natural resource management, better public access to information and shared decision making with local communities and civil societies.

Urbanisation and Industrialisation. The rate of urbanisation in Asia is mind boggling and without any parallel in the rest of the world. In the mid sixties one Asian in five people lived in cities. Today according to ADB statistics, it is one in three or 1.2 billion people. By 2020 the likely current planning horizon of consulting engineers, one in two or 2.5 billion Asian people will be urban residents mostly in Bangladesh, People’s Republic of China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan. This equates to the need to create and develop new cities and their infrastructure often from green fields for 40 million new citizens (or the equivalent perhaps of Paris, London and New York together) every single year. By 2020 about 15 Asian cities will have reached the status of megacity, (urban agglomeration that are home to 10 million people or more). To top it all, this highly concentrated urban growth has been closely linked with industrialisation. The majority of industrial activities occur within urban areas and the environmental impacts of industrialisation are amplified by concentrated urban form. According to the World Bank, the Bangkok region, for example accounts for almost half of Thailand’s GDP and a little more than 75% of the manufacturing value added of the country. Four cities in Indonesia (Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung and Semarang) account for 27% of Indonesia’s industrial output. The prodigious growth of Asian urban cum industrial areas helped lower the fraction of Asian GDP originating in agriculture from 35 to 18 percent between 1970 and 1997. This dramatic shift of economic activities away from rural agrarian communities brought however a plethora of social, economic and environmental problems that affect future economic growth prospects. Proliferation of slums, impossible traffic congestion, uncontrolled industrial growth, unprecedented degradation of air quality, encroachment on natural systems and public health degradation from water pollution, poor drainage and missing solid waste management infrastructure and services are the most common. Cities such as Manila or Jakarta generate upwards of 8 millions metric tons of hazardous waste every year, much of which is simply dumped into the environment. To arrest the risk of Asian urban decay, regulatory initiatives will need to address urban pollution issues in the context of concentrated industrialisation patterns. Policies needed include the systematic application and enforcement of ecologically sound principles like polluter pays and subsidiarity, integrated urban/industrial development plans, strengthened land-use control, improved industrial ecology as well as increased stakeholder participation in decision making and greater public/private sector collaboration for urban infrastructure investment.

Poverty. Among the various socio-economic sustainability difficulties facing Asia, fighting poverty remains the leading challenge. Despite past most impressive economic development achievement of the region in the last thirty years that helped reduce poverty (despite explosive population growth) from 1,200 billion people in 1975 to 825 million in 1995, poverty in Asia remains pervasive. The recent Asian financial crisis stopped economic progress for a while and reversed poverty trends in negative territory. Two thirds of the world’s poor, people that lives on less than a dollar a day, live in Asia. In particular the attractiveness of Asian urban centers as engine of economic growth (80% of recent Asian economic growth according to ADB statistics) exacerbates rural-urban migration that increases the pressure on overloaded urban infrastructure. This leads to a growing share of Asian poor being urban poor deprived from rudimentary water, sanitation and health services, suffering most from the degradation of the environmental common and representing a growing drag on the regional economic growth potential.

Finance. The cost of meeting urgent and rapidly expanding development infrastructure needs in Asia is staggering. There is a yawning gap between the demand and the supply of available financing. ADB estimates shows that annually the Asian region requires 38 billion dollars to meet the needs for urban infrastructure only. Over the next 25 years, the total investment required will amount to over 3 trillion dollars. There is no way that Asian governments can channel funding at the level needed to meet even the minimal requirements for urban infrastructure compatible with sustainable development. In line with recent experience and in spite of some anecdotal exception or failure, national and local governments will have to try harder to mobilise internal and external resources bringing creatively into play the private sector as partner in development. This will require courageous policies that can support the deployment of various privatisation models sufficiently attractive to mobilise private capital for the development and operation of efficient urban infrastructure and services. To ensure wide public acceptance of these models, governments will have to develop strong supervisory authorities that can efficiently and fairly oversee private providers of public services based on the rule of law, transparency, performance, social justice and the protection of the common good. As private capital tend to flow into projects with sound return on investment, enhanced capacity building toward improved financial autonomy, responsibility and accountability especially at city and local government level where infrastructure are demanded will also be needed on a vastly broader scale.

Governance. Environmental degradation in Asia is critically the result of inadequate policies that failed to effectively integrate environmental concerns in the plans for economic development. Although Asian countries introduced numerous environmental regulations and standards during the past decades, fragmented environmental responsibilities, piecemeal implementation, ineffective enforcement and constrained resources have so far hampered results. Importantly environmental agencies and ministries remain weak and often marginalised in the decision making process by their economic development counterparts that tend to view environmental quality and economic development as two diverging and mutually exclusive objectives. This results in inept policies and subsidies that keeps the price of natural resources such as energy, water, forest, coastal resources or minerals low and the economic rents from extraction high, that help accelerate depletion and degradation. Behind such policies are often excessively centralised top-down decision-making processes with governmental administration or private cronies exercising exclusive control as owner, planner, manager, monitor and overseer of the environmental common. Transparent accountability mechanisms towards stakeholders and civil society and civic engagement that can help place increased pressure on government and private corporation to improve environmental quality, (already in the making in certain countries sometimes even with governmental support) will need to be further strengthened.

In the face of the above seemingly endless list of failures and challenges and such a rather poor regional environmental report card for the present, can Asia still be saved from environmental hell?

Like Western Europe that started its environmental renaissance thirty years ago when Holland could not afford to treat Rhine water anymore because it was too polluted, It is bare economic necessity that will start the Asian environmental revolution and save Asia from environmental disaster. Three trends in particular lead to believe that the days of Asian environmental reckoning are nearing.

First the cost of environmental degradation although poorly documented and probably grossly understated is not anymore negligible. The rise of ramshackle slums areas, snarled traffic, uncontrolled industrial growth, poor air quality, the open dumping of garbage, mishandling of toxic and hazardous waste, increased flooding and degraded and depleted water resources is starting to cost Asia dearly. According to some ADB reports, the economic impacts of pollution in Asian cities in terms of loss of productivity and health costs alone have been estimated to range from 1 to 5 percent of their GDP. Given the intricate interdependence of the Asian urban-industrial development complex, it is possible that the overall foregone loss of capacity to grow economically caused by the current Asian environmental laissez-faire (along the motto pollute now, pay later) is a two digits multiple of the above percentage. This can not be neglected anymore by national economic development boards. As the cost of environmental degradation keep rising and is better documented and presented to national economic decision makers, expect Asian governments to build serious momentum toward environmental improvement. This change may not follow however the path of the most industrialised countries. Instead of relying heavily on costly command and control regulation, Asian governments may prefer more gentle but as persuasive market based mechanisms such as voluntary environmental management standards, full cost pricing, public disclosure and the participatory engagement of community groups.

The second trend has to do with the very nature of the development cycle. At an initial stage of development, many Asian economies like Europe perhaps 50 years ago, focused on pollution- and energy-intensive manufacturing and primary resource processing industries. With rising wealth and a growing educated middle class many first and second tier Asian countries are now entering downstream, secondary, more value added assembling and processing and tertiary services including research and development. These activities are not only less brutally polluting. They also often need cleaner environmental conditions to be run efficiently and can better practically contribute to the creation of indigenous environmental improvement solutions. Expect therefore governmental and public pressure for better environmental quality in Asia to grow markedly in the coming years. This will create a virtuous circle, reminiscent from Europe since 25 years, where more wealth, more local engineering capability and more public participation help generate more willingness and more capacity to deal effectively with the environment. Strong believer of the efficiency of market forces, Asian policy makers may favour economic instruments along the international supply chain brought upon by globalisation. After all most of the Asian economic growth momentum came about through export led strategies. There is no reason not to believe that Asian industrialists can learn to meet global environmental market requirements such as those reflected in the ISO 14000 series of environmental management standards, the same way they have learned quality, just in time delivery and packaging requirements.

The third trend is the consequence of future growth itself that starts to show in the economic development blueprints of many Asian countries. It is perhaps the most compelling. In spite of outstanding growth achievement in the last thirty years, Asia is still in the early stage of industrialisation. Judging by the rapid multiplication of industrial areas, zones and parks across the region, the first few decades of the 21^st century will witness an enormous further expansion of industrial investment necessary to feed the large and young urban populations of the region. Most if not all the industrial stock that will be in place in Asia 20 years from now, is not on the ground today. When combined with expected further increases of population, the consequence will be a very large increase of natural resources consumption especially energy, water, agricultural and forestry products and land that the region or the world may have great difficulty of yielding without quantum leap efficiency gains. Out of an urgent basic need to survive, expect the future industrial and urban development of the region to change course toward significantly improved efficiency of the use and reuse of natural resources, vastly improved intensity of energy, water and material consumption and strongly reduced waste emission and dissipation. Faced with resource allocation pressures unmatched in the world, the region will probably become also the global magnet and brainstorming playground for the most advanced and innovative resource efficiency solutions. To enable this change environmental policies will pervade many other development goals leading to integrative environmental regulatory policies covering industrial development, technology innovation, trade regime, investment measures, FDI as well as urban planning and management. Common denominator will be the need to develop effective systems to measure environmental and sustainability performance and in particular the energy, materials, pollution and waste intensity of production and related technology choices that can ensure that the urban-industrial activities of the region remain supportive of overall improvement in socio-economic welfare.

What all these trends teach us about consulting engineering opportunities in Asia? Here also three aspects stand out.

The obvious first lesson is that the ultimate solutions needed to solve Asian environmental difficulties boil down to hard technology/engineering infrastructure, facility, equipment and best practices needed by municipalities, corporation and companies to produce and create wealth efficiently with minimal wastage and environmental impact. This per se is an encouraging prospect that hopefully meets a core competence and interest of consulting engineers.

The second lesson may be that the international experience accumulated by consulting engineers in most industrialised countries may not be fully relevant for direct transfer into Asia. As indicated above Asia is the seat of particular severe economic, institutional and technological constraints that are vastly different from the rest of the world. For example the capacity of a city to pay for an environmental service has no common measure to the budget available to a comparable municipality in the West. A city of 50,000 people in Europe is anyway already a large, mature, autonomously governed and financially independent community. In many less developed Asian countries 500,000 people or ten times more may be just a cluster of villages with little in a way of governance autonomy and managerial capacity. An industrial zone of 1000 hectares in the US would probably be considered large. Industrial parks hundred times that size is probably the norm in many coastal Chinese provinces or industrialised Indian states. While land in Asia is usually scarce and very expensive, development space in industrialised countries tend to be relatively abundant and cheap. A Western city may have been able to grow and hone its infrastructure and services over many decencies if not more. Many largest Asian cities are essentially void of them and have an urgent and immediate need for complete, complex, efficient, high performance, lowest cost and easily scalable systems. As a case of point, providing an efficient and cost effective waste collection system to a 60 story high rise low cost housing building in Hongkong serving perhaps a population of over 2000 people poses technical challenges mostly unheard in the Western world. All these mightily different constraints and pressures call for new Asia specific solutions with source of innovation located often in uncharted territories such as minimal foot-print, absolute simplicity of operation and lowest cost. This may make an entrepreneurial innovator salivate. Practically however this spells also risk for a manager that has to warrant that unproved new technology will work best, immediately and under the hardest operative conditions.

The third lesson finally is that technology and engineering alone will not do the trick. Enabling policies and conducive institutional and financial frameworks are prerequisites. This calls for a widening of consulting engineering skills to cover more exotic areas such as institutional engineering and financial engineering without which plain engineering can not even get started. Whatever its importance, institutional engineering in Asia, may be a difficult field to embrace for an expert from an industrialised country. Evolving an authority in charge of supervising the privatisation or the private operation of an urban infrastructure in an industrialising country was usually a slow (politically cushioned) process that could always count on the accumulated wisdom of many years of strong, efficient and appreciated operational experience as public service. Comparable supervisory authorities that need to be evolved in Asia, need often to be created from scratch to oversee the establishment of mostly new infrastructure and services with no or worse poor past track record. This makes potential beneficiaries a priori distrustful with greater uncertainty for investor regarding the capacity and willingness to pay for the service and how the service can be made available at a fair and socially acceptable price to all especially the poor. With a huge financial gap to be bridged, financial engineering for Asian urban infrastructure is expected to be equally critical. Much creativity will be required to leverage the resources available in the ultra competitive global capital market. The selling point to investors will have to be a promise of longer-term steady profit wrapped into short-term losses dictated by the scale of the investment and the limited current affordability to pay of the Asian population.

All these lessons point out to challenging and interesting tasks for consultant engineers focused on Asia. Clients will more often be private parties that depend critically on the development of new technology and the support of adequate institutional and financial frameworks to deploy them. Driven by a relentless need to significantly improve performance especially the energy, materials, pollution and waste intensity at local plant or township level, they will need the advice of specialists. Services in demand will include how to build resource efficiency gains into plant and service operation, how to assess the performance of imported equipment, how to innovate locally with foreign technology and how to manage efficiently a process of technical change and global technology acquisition. Industry or sector specific technical information, benchmarks, standards, codes of practice as well as technology-specific performance indicators and intermediaries that can help lower the transaction cost of technology transfer between most advanced countries and Asia will also be widely required. Operating under private-law models, clients will have very different requirement and performance benchmarks than traditional institutional customers, with the capacity to raise the rate of return counting for more than the time spend on a project or the weight and volume of paper produced.

Not surprisingly, doing that all and doing it well will requires government to invest as well especially in soft measures such as technical capability-building and training in engineering design, facility benchmarking, equipment efficiency evaluation and technology innovation. This will mean institution building and the development and nurturing of centers of competence that can research, plan, test and inspect greater environmental performance and efficiency and provide information about hard-to-get cleaner process technologies. All these efforts will be opportunities for consulting engineers.

The widening horizon of skills needed by consulting engineers to succeed in Asia highlighted above may however be calling for some changes of practice in the profession. Many consulting engineers are sometimes content to act as single edge small squares interacting seamlessly and efficiently with client with comparable technical background regarded as their peers. Consulting engineers of the future especially in Asia may have to start to act as multi-disciplinary small circles perfectly at ease to discuss all aspects of a project competence. This may include institutional setup, finance and budget, management system, trade law and regulation, and technology or engineering to be discussed in parallel with various layers of professionals from a client. Best reflected in the symbolic of the Asian Ying and Yang sign, successful consulting engineers in Asia may also need to learn to take and share risks with partners and periodically alternate role between fee earning tasks and free contributions.

In conclusion let explore how in the rapidly changing and fluid Asian consulting engineering market, companies can do better to access the region and build market share?

Given the complexity of the market and the multiplicity of market players, no one-fit-all recommendation is appropriate. In the light of the observations of this article, five common sense efforts may be worth considering.

1. Joint more additional networks that can provide access to new project opportunities. Traditional channel to access public tender for institutional projects are well known from consulting companies. Such projects represent however a dwindling share of the business opportunities. Many interesting engineering projects in Asia are awarded under private law by corporations that do not bother to publicise their interests or requirements. Riding on the prodigious networking capacity of the internet, consulting engineer firms can greatly benefit from joining the multitude of formal and informal networks of professionals and interest groups that can provide project leads. In Asia one never has enough professional contacts.
2. Forge strategic alliances with new partners beyond the global consulting engineer community. Consulting engineer firms often seek partnership with like-minded consulting companies. Due to the growing complexity, diversity and private orientation of the market, it is however becoming impossible for one firm to offer with adequate level of excellence the wide diversity of sharp, private-business skills needed by a project. In dealing with private clients, the fine line between paid consulting engineers services and unpaid risk sharing project input tend also to get blurred. Private customers appreciate excellence, performance, connection and financial strength but not necessarily a fully protected independent status (as long as there is no obvious conflict of business interest). A strategic alliance beyond the consulting engineering community can therefore add valuable private-law competence and enrich the network of contacts for project leads as well. Target groups for value adding partnerships may include management consultants, accounting firms, lawyer firms as well as research institutes, testing laboratories and certification bodies or even project developers, construction firms, services operators, performance contractors or suppliers of equipment.
3. Localise staff, business culture and structure through locally registered legal entities. Private clients usually prefer to deal with locally registered companies for various reasons of national pride, accessibility, local content requirements, intellectual property rights, liability or else. In addition fee level in Asia is always a prime concern and international staff tend to cost a multiple of local experts. By localising staff, allowing local managers to grow business on their own and keeping a global strategy and an internationally recognised brand name, a company can better keep cost in check and enhance its presence and attractiveness for large internationally connected customers. It also facilitates the development of a local network for in-country project leads while maintaining a regional or global outreach through networking with head office and other subsidiaries in other countries.
4. Use projects in first-tier industrialising countries as showcase and springboard to the rest of Asia. Asian clients because of the peculiar constraints faced by the region tend often to rely primarily on solutions tested and proved in Asia. Due to the steep economic development differential observed between countries, technical applications tend to trickle down from first-tier to further tier countries in a cascade and chain reaction. This makes a project reference in a higher tier Asian country worth any number of projects outside the region. Beware however that clients in first-tier countries are full aware of the value of such showcase projects and therefore try to squeeze newcomers owning attractive new technology into a zero margin technology proofing game.
5. Shift attention to "economic cooperation" institutional support schemes for project leads and acquisition. Many multilateral and bilateral development agencies are changing gears. Development assistance that provide opportunities for consulting engineers to enter a project as full paid client is diminishing and increasingly focused on poverty alleviation only. Infrastructural projects that aim to serve a wider audience of beneficiaries (specially people that can afford to pay for a service and can therefore make a project economically viable for a private investor) tend to be facilitated under the label of "economic cooperation". As the name indicates "economic cooperation" programmes often offer co-financing only and force proponents to enter a project as risk taking partner that helps create a better drive for success oriented output. Because of the lower endowment per project, the fact also that such programmes impact on pre-competitive upstream steps of the project cycle as well as the cash-flow risk needed, economic cooperation schemes are often shunned by consulting engineers. Because of the very constraints underlying their design, "economic cooperation" facilitated projects tend however to be more dynamic, attract more dedicated partners and clients and therefore are more prone to successful outcome and follow-up. Consulting engineers neglecting "economic cooperation" assistance programmes may in fact be missing opportunity to win over potential customers and acquire serious project leads in a vibrant segment of the market in which private investors are most active.

As stated at the beginning of this article, consulting engineering in Asia has a bright future. Demand is here to grow together with the pressure to reconcile economic development and human welfare in a hugely capable and dynamic region. If the opportunities are there, the ways to reach them may however be less straightforward than in the past. It will require vision, courage, competence and dedication. Like with the dot.com fever and the internet explosion, innovative prime movers will richly benefit. Laggards may loose out and put their future economic survival in jeopardy.