In an era when governments worldwide are too cash-strapped to build or upgrade sorely needed infrastructure, some have experimented with long-term concessions (often referred to as public-private partnerships, or P3s) to private consortia to finance, design, build, operate and maintain infrastructure assets. P3s offer potential solutions to this infrastructure challenge, along with political challenges. Existing governance theories (typically drawn from economics, sociology, psychology or public administration) provide partial insights for governing shorter-lived, less complex transactions, but are inadequate to guide the necessary legislation, contracts, and management practices for P3 infrastructure projects to thrive and remain sustainable over their typical 30-year concession terms. This project integrates and expands upon previous work to build a cross disciplinary theoretical framework that will ultimately help design new governance approaches for enhancing the efficiency and speed-of-delivery advantages of P3s.
Economists agree that investments in expanded delivery of high quality civil infrastructure assets provide enormous and widely shared public benefits. Such investments can also generate multi-decade, relatively low-risk, inflation-adjusted cash flows, so they offer excellent investment opportunities for pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and other institutional investors who could deploy their huge pools of capital into P3 infrastructure projects to stabilize and boost their portfolio investment returns while supporting worthy economic development. This project will also inform the governance of complex and multi-faceted organizations, such as P3s, with recommendations for both future research and new public policy initiatives.
