Public-private partnerships for infrastructure development : finance, stakeholder alignment, governance

Large infrastructure projects often face significant cost overruns and stakeholder fragmentation. Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) allow governments to procure long-term infrastructure services from private providers, rather than developing, financing and managing infrastructure assets themselves. Aligning public and private interests and institutional logics to create robust, decades-long service contracts subject to shifting economic and political contexts is a significant cross-sectoral governance challenge. This work summarizes over a decade of research conducted by scholars at Stanford's Global Projects Center and multiple US and International collaborators to enhance the governance of both infrastructure projects and institutional investors, whose long term, cash flow obligations align especially well with the kinds of long term inflation-adjusted returns that PPP infrastructure projects can generate. In these pages, multiple theoretical perspectives are integrated and combined with empirical evidence to examine how experiences from more mature PPP jurisdictions can help improve PPP governance approaches worldwide. The information contained here will appeal to engineering, economics, political science, public policy and finance scholars interested in the delivery of high-quality, sustainable infrastructure services to the citizens in countries with established and emerging market economies. Officials in national, state/provincial and local government agencies seeking alternative financing and service provision strategies for their civil and social infrastructure, and legislators and their staff members interested in promoting PPP legislation will find this book invaluable. It will also be of high interest to long-term investment professionals from pension funds, sovereign funds, family offices and university endowments seeking to deploy money into the infrastructure asset class, and practitioners seeking insights into methods for enhancing stakeholder incentive alignment, reducing transaction costs and improving project outcomes in PPPs.