Failure links between public and private sector partners in transportation public private partnerships failures

Abstract

In spite of increased popularity of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) models for delivering public transportation infrastructures, the international experiences in recent past have shown massive problems and partnership failures. Motivated by such failures, the authors undertook case studies of thirty five failed transportation PPP projects in last two decades from developed and developing nations to evaluate root causes that drove transportation PPPs to the status rated as failure. The results of case studies yield a set of failure drivers caused transportation PPPs failures. The case studies also reveal the tendency of failure drivers to trigger new failure drivers, therefore confirming the causal relationships among failure drives. A causal relationship between two failure drivers is then termed as failure link. The identification of failure links not only reveals the causal relationships between failure drivers but also portrays the impact of actions of one partner on other project partners and on overall project progress. Following this identification, this paper discusses the failure links between public and private sectors; and explains that how the two primary partners in transportation PPPs create problems for each other. 