In the recent past, several countries and states have begun to use Public‐Private‐Partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure development and have attempted to create institutional environments that enable PPPs. Providing an enabling environment for PPPs entails a combination of institutional creation and changing existing institutions relating to project procurement. This paper attempts to understand how path‐dependant institutional change takes place in the context of PPPs and their enabling environments, and why different institutional environments evolve differently, using two cases: the implementation of PPPs in the road sector in the Netherlands and in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. We identify two factors that can be used as predictors of the direction of institutional change: a long‐term orientation towards institutional change and a willingness to learn and modify transitional institutions. Where these factors exist, and thereby provide a goodness of fit, institutional change is likely to occur.

We examine the role of participatory design activities in supporting sensemaking while anticipating technological effects in smart cities. The effects of technology are not univocal. Therefore, creating smart city visions that enclose multiple meanings requires providing environments where stakeholders make the often-implicit processes of meaning attribution to technology explicit. We develop and test three participatory design activities to anticipate value changes and controversies in smart cities, and analyze how these activities supported seven sense-making properties. Our results show that visibilizing, reframing, and imagining are key characteristics of participatory design activities in supporting sense-making. Visibilizing technological impacts 'makes things public,' revealing existing perspectives and fostering new ones. Reframing technological impacts enhances empathy for diverse interests instead of treating smart cities as technical problems. Imagining supports understanding connections between technology and society to anticipate impacts. Our insights contribute to the provision of participatory design activities to articulate multiple meanings around smart cities.