Investigation of Project Delivery Risks in Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) Infrastructure Projects in UAE - A Stakeholder's Perspective

Abstract

The concept of Public Private Partnerships (PPP) Projects is a widely used method of executing infrastructure projects around the world, where it utilizes the private sector's contribution to benefit both the public agency as well as the private sector implementing the project. The PPP project delivery methods are relatively new to the developing middle-eastern region generally, and to the UAE specifically and there has been very few completed PPP Projects. This paper aims towards investigating risks related to the PPP Projects by ranking such risks in order of importance and rate of occurrence. To achieve this task, relevant data that would contribute to the analysis of the risks are collected. The method of data collection for this paper was a series of surveys and semi-structured interviews directed towards informed targets representing the different stakeholders of PPP projects such as Private Proponent Managers, Federal Government Officers, Engineering Practitioners etc. The analysis of the survey results showed that the risks concerned with the private sector were significantly different than those concerned with the public sector. The research also concludes that proper risk mitigation measures must be implemented in order to optimize the process of utilizing the concept of PPPs in the UAE.