Analytical Review on Transportation Public Private Partnerships Failures

Governments around the globe are embracing Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) to overcome financial and technical deficit and to provide public infrastructure on faster pace. However, PPPs are complex institutional arrangements involving many players from diversified fields and thus bringing more risk to the project. Numerous researches had been conducted to investigate potential risks and success factors for establishing PPPs. But, as appetite for transportation PPPs is increasing around the globe, more problems and partnership failures are being witnessed. Existence of such failures and faults, despite of the availability of scientific protocols, motivate the authors to investigate transportation PPPs failures in past two decades. The investigation led to the identification of forty eight potential failure reasons, responsible for transportation PPPs. The identification of “potential failure reasons” was made possible through thirty five transportation PPPs case studies. The investigation through case studies reveals that the adoption of PPPs in different regions was motivated by specific reasons besides fundamental financial and technical concerns. These specific reasons had played important roles in the project success and failure. This paper discusses the global trend of transportation PPPs in different economies with evidence of potential failure reasons and their causal relationships