Criteria to identify candidate roads for public private partnership development

Abstract

In many cases, Public Private Partnership (PPP) projects are looked as skeptical phenomenon due to the risk factors involvement. However, in order to reduce the burden of government, it is essential to undertake PPP projects. Lack of project prioritization due to absence of supporting framework for selecting the projects in Sri Lanka was identified as one of the key findings by World Bank for accelerating PPP projects. Therefore, a study was conducted to identify the critical success and failure factors of PPP road projects in other countries, thus assist the public and private entities to identify the potential road projects in Sri Lanka. The aim of this research is to prioritize project from pipelines for PPP developments. Success of the projects are measured based on the risk allocation efficiency and productive efficiency. As a first step, criteria which are used by other nations for selection of PPP projects were collected. Further, Critical Successful Factors (CSF) of PPP projects were reviewed during the project preparation, procurement, development, construction, operation and maintenance stages. Top most factors were selected from various researches. Meanwhile, in this research we have considered not only the success case studies but also the failure road projects to critically analyze the factors influenced in the failure of those projects. In many cases, one of the prime reasons for failure was the absence of CSF. The importance of these factors in the selection criteria was analyzed. Having prepared the CSF, readiness of accepting the PPP model, constraints for the development and challenges for the implementation of PPP model in Sri Lanka can be evaluated. As an improvement of the research, questionnaire survey can be carried out and the stakeholder opinions can be taken. Major limitation in this study is that, there are no any PPP road projects in Sri Lanka, to compare our exploration and the real-world project scenario. In addition, another limitation was the lack of availability of detailed documentation in the projects.