The “3P Challenge”: Gaming and Reflecting on Partnership Meaning within Long-Term Infrastructure Contracts

This paper introduces the “3P challenge”, a serious game on the dual position of public and private managers as members of temporal and permanent organizations that incorporates the conceptualization of multi-level governance structure of temporal organizing from a critical realist perspective. Its gaming cycle aims at activating participants reflexivity to consider competing demands in PPP contexts. In this regard, the game can serve as a research tool for capturing insights into adversarial and collaborative interactions in the ex-post phase of PPPs, as well as a space for reflecting on governing issues and activity in the ex-post phase of PPP. Based on two gamming sessions with Dutch practitioners and civil engineering students, we discuss how the game provides insights into the creative enactment of PPP clauses in the Netherlands, the need to better understand how collaborative relationships emerge from the creative enactment of contractual penalties as well as a situational dimension of opportunism.