Stakeholder collaboration in United Kingdom (UK) Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) social infrastructure provision

Abstract

This research investigates stakeholder collaboration in Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) for the provision of ‘more and better’ social infrastructure in the United Kingdom (UK). Infrastructure development has been targeted by governments internationally as a vehicle for national growth. However, as economic infrastructure provision continues to dominate investment discord, there are ‘signposts’ pointing towards the need for social infrastructure provision particularly in Western Nations. The UK has suffered from a legacy of underinvestment. Moreover, as the UK continues to undertake protracted austerity policies to address the implications of the Global Financial Crisis and growing national debt, there is appetite for greater private-sector participation in the provision of social infrastructure. This is to serve the bilateral purpose of levering alternative sources of capital into infrastructure as well as to enhance investment impact through greater efficiencies in provision frameworks. This has re-stimulated debate over the viability of cross-sectoral initiatives such as PPP. PPP has already been pivotal in UK social infrastructure provision. However, the previous framework; the Private Finance Initiative, has been discredited and lambasted for delivering poor Value for Money (VfM), with the partnership being identified as a primary source of poor project performance. This research addresses this knowledge gap. Using a biquantitative research methodology comprising a quantitative assessment of datasets sourced from Infrastructure Journal (IJ) Online Database as well as survey questionnaires, this investigation contributes: a contemporary analysis of the UK PPP social infrastructure market; defines the PPP social infrastructure partnership boundary specification; determines the ranked salience of PPP stakeholder collaboration attributes identified from literature; empirically extracts six PPP stakeholder collaboration components premised on bestpractice exemplars; and applies these findings to the PPP project lifecycle to produce a PPP stakeholder collaboration framework which can be used to provide meaningful inputs to inform policy, industry practitioners and future academic investigation.

Date of Award	Oct 2018
Original language	English
Supervisor	John McCord (Supervisor), Sharon Mc Clements (Supervisor) & Martin Haran (Supervisor)