Review of studies on the Critical Success Factors for Public–Private Partnership (PPP) projects from 1990 to 2013

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Highlights

  • The CSFs for implementing PPP projects is increasingly becoming important to both researchers and practitioners.

  • Papers on CSFs for PPPs from 1990 to 2013 were analyzed quantitatively.

  • The top key CSFs from literature from 1990 to 2013 have been identified.

  • Other insights such as active contributors, research origin and methods have been analyzed.

  • Research gaps and future research directions are highlighted.

Abstract

The Critical Success Factors for Public–Private Partnership is a major research interest worldwide therefore this paper aims to methodically review studies on the CSFs for implementing PPP from some selected top tier academic journals from 1990 to 2013 (years inclusive). The search results indicated an increased research interest in the exploration of PPP CSFs since 1990. The mostly identified CSFs are risk allocation and sharing, strong private consortium, political support, community/public support and transparent procurement. It was further noticed that Australia, the U.K., China and Hong Kong have been the countries of focus for most research studies on PPP CSFs. Finally the research approaches adopted are case study, questionnaire survey and mixed methods. The findings revealed provide an overview of CSFs for PPPs in order to enhance future implementations. Moreover a checklist of CSFs for PPPs has been developed, which could be adopted for further empirical studies.

Introduction

Following the 2007–2008 global financial crises there has been an increasing interest in the adoption of public–private partnership (PPP) policy by governments in both developed and developing countries. Many governments across the globe are now seeking to tap the private sector's expertise and capital to minimize their infrastructure deficit; in this regard researchers worldwide have also attempted to investigate into the implementation and operations of this sensitive policy (Chan et al., 2010, Cheung et al., 2012, Grimsey and Lewis, 2002). The publications of these researchers have therefore enabled both practitioners and new researchers to gain more insight into the whole concept of PPP policy (Al-Sharif and Kaka, 2004).

Given the growing interest in PPP since the late 1990s (Li et al., 2005b), different areas of PPP have been explored and investigated; areas such as risk management (Akintoye et al., 1998, Shen et al., 2006), relationship management (Abdul-Aziz, 2001, Chan et al., 2003, Smyth and Edkins, 2007), financial viabilities (Bakatjan et al., 2003, Wibowo, 2004) and procurement (Ng et al., 2007, Ye and Tiong, 2003) have all been extensively explored by researchers worldwide.

For the past decades, a major area of PPP studies that has received much attention from researchers is PPP success factors. This was revealed in a review of PPP research trend from 1998 to 2008 by Ke et al. (2009); similarly, Tang et al. (2010) pointed out PPP project success as a major research area which is of interest to researchers. The above indications exhibit how researchers worldwide are interested in exploring the best ways of delivering PPP projects. However, there is no doubt that this area of PPP would continue to be of great interest to researchers in future as PPP market keeps growing and maturing in other jurisdictions and sectors (Chan et al., 2010).

Despite the increasing interest in the success factors for PPP projects, the attention given to the need for review and analysis of what has already been identified in literature is lacking. It is therefore of value to conduct a systematic and critical review of literature on the critical success factors (CSFs) for PPP so as to broaden the understanding of the best ways of delivering PPP projects to both practitioners and researchers. In this regard, a systematic review of PPP success factors is undertaken in this paper with the following derived objectives:

  • 1.

    To ascertain the annual publication trends of CSFs for PPP projects from 1990 to 2013;

  • 2.

    To identify authors' origin/country and the active contributors in exploring the CSFs for PPP projects from 1990 to 2013;

  • 3.

    To identify countries with most published papers on the CSFs for PPP projects and assess their impact on the countries PPP practices;

  • 4.

    To summarize, compare and contrast the findings of PPP CSFs studies from 1990 to 2013.

It is believed that the critical review of success factors for PPP would provide relevant practices, which could be adopted in implementing future PPP projects. Additionally this review provides a checklist of CSFs for PPP projects which could be adopted for further empirical research studies.

This paper begins with the background of PPP procurement method. Secondly, an overview of the concept of CSFs in PPP studies is presented. Then the methodology employed in this paper is described. The findings from the selected academic journals from 1990 to 2013 are presented and discussed. Finally conclusions are stated and future research work is proposed.

Section snippets

Background of PPPs

Public–private partnership (PPP) has been defined in several ways by researchers and practitioners with each definition varying slightly from each other (Abadie and Howcroft, 2004, Cuttaree and Mandri-Perrott, 2011). Through PPP schemes, the private sector's skill and management expertise is employed in delivering public infrastructure projects (Skietrys et al., 2008). In fact, this method of procurement provides an effective way of delivering “value for money” public infrastructure as well as

Critical Success Factor model in previous PPP studies

According to Rockart (1982), critical success factors (CSFs) could be defined as the ‘few key areas of activity where favorable results are absolutely necessary for a manager to reach his/her goals’. The CSF model has been employed for management measures since the 1970s (Mohr and Spekman, 1994). This approach actually opens the major areas necessary for ensuring success in management (Boynton and Zmud, 1984).

Since the evolution of PPP, a number of researchers have employed the concept of CSFs

Research methodology

In order to fully review and analyze the findings of previous research studies of a particular topic or research area, a methodical analysis of publications in academic journals is necessary (Tsai and Wen, 2005). In this regard, a similar three stage search process adopted by Yi and Wang (2013); Hong et al (2012) was employed to conduct a content analysis of the success factors of PPP related papers published from 1990 to 2013 (both years inclusive) and this is presented in Fig. 1. The three

Annual publications on critical success factors for PPP projects from 1990 to 2013

From the initial search results, a total number of 72 publications on the CSFs for PPP projects were identified with 52 different journals from 1990 to 2013 (years inclusive). This clearly is an indication of the growing concept of PPP since its evolution in the early 1990s (Gunnigan and Rajput, 2010). However as mentioned in the research methodology section the journals, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management (JCEM), Construction Management and Economics (CME), International

Conclusions

To bridge their huge infrastructure gaps, governments across the world are increasingly adopting PPP policy. In this regard, researchers worldwide have conducted considerable investigations into the CSFs for implementing this policy since its inception. To review the trend of research on PPP CSFs, a three-stage review of publications from 1990 to 2013 (years inclusive) was conducted. The Scopus search engine was used for the initial search for journals with high publications on the CSFs for PPP

Conflict of interest

Authors confirm that the study presented in this paper has no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgment

This study forms part of a PhD research project which is fully supported by the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme (HKPFS) from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Research Grants Council (RGC) of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

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