Roles of Private-Sector Partners in Transportation Public-Private Partnership Failures

AbstractPublic-private partnership (PPP) models for public infrastructure delivery are becoming popular among government institutions around the world, due to their embedded potential value for money (VFM) to the public and governments themselves. The experience with infrastructure PPPs internationally have demonstrated many problems and partnership failures, where both the public and private sectors suffered huge losses. Motivated by a number of these failures, this study investigates the actions and decisions of private-sector partners by evaluating 35 failed transportation PPPs around the world. This paper identifies a set of drivers responsible for the failures of transportation PPPs, discusses the causal relationships between them, and finally evaluates a set of failure mechanisms initiated by the private-sector partners. It sheds light on the role of private-sector partners in terms of triggering failure mechanisms in transportation PPP failures. The identification of failure mechanisms discloses th...