Evaluating SPV stakeholder integration on PPP projects.

Abstract

A Public Private Partnership (PPP) describes an arrangement between the public and the private sectors for providing a public asset or service. One of the most distinguishing features of PPPs is the presence of a singular entity, the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), which is the organization representing the private sector that is responsible for the financing, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of the project over a long-term period. This SPV combines a number of stakeholders including the Design-Build Contractor and the Operations and Maintenance Contractor under one umbrella, and together these stakeholders are responsible for delivering a successful project. Consequently, the key to ensuring successful project delivery is the efficient management and integration of the various stakeholders involved to deliver the project as a unified SPV team. However, the stakeholder management role of the SPV is highly under-investigated in the literature and there exists a gap regarding the SPV’s internal stakeholder relationships and interactions. Additionally, no studies exist that attempt to investigate the degree of stakeholder integration within the SPV. Therefore, there is a significant need to investigate and evaluate the efficiency of SPV stakeholder integration, considering that it is both a prerequisite and driver of PPP project success. This research aims to address this need through a focused study on the SPV organization and an evaluation of its management efficiency in terms of stakeholder integration. This study proposes metrics to measure SPV collaboration, projected from other integrated project delivery systems, and henceforth develops a “Health-Check” tool to evaluate the overall degree of SPV stakeholder integration. The tool is applied to a well-recognized PPP airport project in the Middle East to assess the level of collaboration between the different project participants and identify shortfalls. The significance of this research is twofold. First, it fills a significant