Investigation of the challenges facing public-private partnership projects in Australia

Abstract

The practice of implementing infrastructure projects through a public-private partnership (PPP) arrangement is widely employed around the world with successful outcomes. However, this practice is not without challenges related to cost, time and quality variations, which the public is forced to bear. This study aims to explore factors influencing the termination of the East West Link project in Melbourne and present time and cost variation challenges facing the Sydney Light Rail project. This paper utilizes literature, investigating the critical success factors (CSF) for PPP infrastructure projects in an international context, and other readily available data sources such as Australian government publications, the case projects’ reports, news articles, and websites as the sources of data. The data gathered from these sources was then analysed to understand the project challenges and to investigate the relationship between CSF and the challenges. Four challenges were identified, including insufficiency of the business case, political interference, non-independence of implementing organizations and insufficient risk profile identification. The findings can assist to cover the loopholes that might cause similar failures in project planning, risk management, and policy and guideline frameworks. However, efforts should be made in improving the existing policies to accommodate political interests as part of risk measures under the national PPP guidelines.

Critical success factors (CSFs) for motivating end-user stakeholder’s support for ensuring sustainability of PPP projects in Nigerian host communities

“…This perspective has been corroborated by a paper delivered by Olson and Swenson (2011) and Xiao et al (2013) during a construction conference in North America, where end-user stakeholders’ critical role in PPP has been considered to be largely marginalised. Hence, it is important to do more research on end-user stakeholder’s sustainability in any PPP road construction project (Mwakabole et al , 2019).…”

Determination of the Critical Success Criteria for Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Projects in Turkey

“…Besides, these bad results can lead to negative consequences to the economy of the country since the PPP concept is generally preferred in the construction of mega infrastructure projects. For instance, the termination of the East-West Link project resulted in a cost of $0.78 billion with the other undocumented effects on businesses and residents [12]. Capturing lessons from the previous PPP projects is the best way for improving the performance of the PPP projects.…”

Identification and prioritization of stage-level KPIs for BOT projects – evidence from Turkey

“…Besides, low-performing PPP projects can cause huge problems for both the economy and society. For instance, in Australia, the termination of the East-West Link (EWL) project resulted in a cost of US$0.78bn with the other undocumented effects on businesses and residents (Mwakabole et al, 2019).…”