Public-Private Partnerships for Transport Infrastructure: Exploring Conditions and Links to Sustainability

The provision of transport infrastructure and services creates fundamental value to society. With traditional sources of transport public funding running short, governments around the world are increasingly turning to public-private finance (PPPs) as a promising tool of public infrastructure project provision. PPPs have proven to be attractive to governments around the world, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Spain, the UK and USA. Sustainability is a priority for many governments and a variety of tools and planning procedures exists for evaluating and assessing economic, environmental and social impacts related to regular transport public project procurement. The literature on transport infrastructure PPPs evaluations is extensive but lacks an explicit systematic reporting linking the PPP process and results to key sustainability principles. This paper contributes to filling this gap presenting the results of a literature study and exploratory review which offers an: 1) identification of key principles of transport sustainability from the literature, that have significance to infrastructure PPPs process and implementation assessment; 2) an overview of challenges that can be posed in infrastructure PPPs implementation concerning sustainability highlighted from the literature and, 3) suggest consideration of three steps: articulation, integration and evaluation and the suggestion that they can become framing elements to emphasize the correspondence between conditions for sustainability in the PPP lifecycle process. The review and analysis presented supports the following conclusions: Although flexibility needs to prevail in every PPP process, when a society’s objective is to achieve greater balance between PPP’s and sustainability, opportunities will be stronger when there is: a) the adoption of a systematic approach that is applied early in the process and runs throughout the entire PPP lifecycle process as exemplified here 2) the establishment of a strong publicly-accountable decision-making authority capable of following the approach through and 3) the commitment not only of the public but of the private actor as well, to act perhaps motivated by corporate social responsibility, committing to bringing innovation and transparency in their efforts for advancing sustainability.

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