Toward an Integrated Lifecycle Governance Framework for Delivering Civil Infrastructure Projects through Public-Private Partnerships (P3s)

The quality of civil infrastructure is widely accepted to be a determinant of public health and the vitality of economies. However, governments of emerging market countries face enormous financial, fiscal and capacity challenges in delivering sorely needed new infrastructure for their growing and rapidly urbanizing populations. At the same time, financially and fiscally strapped governments of mature market economies are struggling to upgrade and retrofit their aging and obsolete infrastructure. Economies at both ends of the development spectrum need more robust project governance that can enable new forms of finance to accelerate and enhance the development of critical infrastructure. Over the past two decades, governments worldwide have experimented with differing approaches for awarding long term (25-99 year) concessions, called “Public-Private Partnerships (P3s),” to finance, design, build and operate individual infrastructure assets previously financed and operated by governments.
This conference paper lays out the problem of long term relational contracting in the infrastructure P3 domain, describes the intellectual challenges in developing an integrated theory that can address it, presents key points of departure from multiple disciplines that have previously been fragmented in their views of relational contracting, and a lays out a research strategy for developing an integrated theoretical framework to capture the complexity of P3 infrastructure projects over their lifecycles.
The research described in this paper is in its infancy, so we have very few findings to report at this time. This conference paper is intended to provide an overview of the theoretical challenges and a review of relevant literature to inform other researchers working on aspects of this problem, and to propose a research approach that can lead to more integrated and coherent theoretical frameworks for understanding and enhancing the governance of P3 infrastructure projects. Our oral presentation at the conference will present preliminary findings from our roundtables and interviews conducted to date. A companion paper by South et al in this conference, presents more detail about the stakeholder engagement phase of this research, which is more mature.