Search results

The awarding of terminals to private operators is considered a prime task of landlord port authorities. Yet, terminal concessions in seaports have only recently gained interest in academic circles. The awarding process poses a complex set of managerial challenges to port authorities, one of the key issues being the determination of the duration of the concession.

Despite the importance of the duration of terminal concessions in seaports, the issue has not received much attention in academic circles. Factors impacting on the duration of contracts, leases or concessions have, however, been studied extensively in other research areas, such as agriculture, coal contracts, franchising and natural gas. This paper uses insights from these academic studies to obtain a better understanding of the impact of concession duration on the stakeholders involved and relates them to empirical evidence on concession length in European seaports. The paper then proposes a classification scheme for the exogenous determination of concession duration, based on techniques developed for Public-Private-Partnerships in large infrastructure projects. In the last section the paper discusses the importance of concession durations to various stakeholders in seaports and illustrates these principles using a case study.

Global crises have become increasingly recurrent events that jeopardize public-private partnerships (PPPs). In this context, the purpose of this paper is to expose the PPP-crisis research agenda by combining bibliometric and network analyses.

The PPP literature associated with global crises between the 2008 global financial crisis and 2022 was analyzed in three stages: (1) paper selection and screening for the inclusion/exclusion of articles relevant to this research, (2) semantic network development for examining thematic relationships among selected papers by considering the co-occurrence of keywords within the chosen studies and (3) calculation of network metrics for analysis.

The paper identified six research avenues for the PPP-crisis agenda: public interest, relational governance, risk management, user-pay PPPs, crisis management and financial performance. The PPP-crisis literature has spread significantly in the last five years driven by the case study approaches on a national or regional basis. Conversely, non-crisis periods generate room to strengthen user-pay PPPs and relational governance. The pandemic and post-pandemic times shared the priorities of the 2008 financial crisis but also strengthened the management of the risks and the structural drivers of the global crisis.

This study demonstrates that during global crisis periods, the public interest and financial performance gain relevance in a detriment of structural solutions to social legitimacy erosion of PPPs because of the urgency of giving tools to the public and private sectors to tackle the financial issues, which steer future issues for PPPs.

This article critically analyses the extent to which selected Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) transportation projects in the Caribbean subregion embrace good practices and how they benefit the public sector.

The article begins with the general rationale of PPPs, leading to a discussion on the specific challenges of the Caribbean subregion and an assessment of certain critical projects. The sample cases include the L F Wade International Airport in Bermuda, the cruise berthing and cargo port redevelopment project in the Cayman Islands, and the Sanger International Airport in Jamaica. There are five aspects to the critical assessment: (a) an evaluation of the type of PPP arrangement used; (b) the legal/policy framework; (c) financial implications; (d) accountability; and (e) miscellaneous data. Desk-based research is conducted as supported by both international and local sources to convey a uniquely local perspective in this under-researched area of scholarship.

PPP frameworks in the Caribbean are improving quickly but remain a work in progress. Jamaica leads the region. Bermuda trails behind. Problems of legal compliance with frameworks and limited market engagement persist, leading to risk management problems.

This article fills a literature gap on critical analysis of individual Caribbean PPP transportation projects. Previous reports, mostly by international organisations, cover regional or sectorial trends. Other sources take a descriptive but not critical approach.

The unprecedented SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic has further constrained the budgets of governments worldwide for delivering their much-needed infrastructure. Consequently, public-private partnerships (PPPs), with the private sector's investment and ingenuity, would appear to be an increasingly popular alternative. Value for money (VfM) has become the major criterion for evaluating PPPs against the traditional public sector procurement and, however, is plagued with controversy. Hence, it is important that governments compare and contrast their practice with similar and disparate bodies to engender best practice. This paper, therefore, aims to understand governments' assessment context and provide a cross-continental comparison of their VfM assessment.

Faced with different domestic contexts (e.g. aging infrastructure, population growth, and competing demands on finance), governments tend to place different emphases when undertaking the VfM assessment. In line with the theory of boundary spanning, a cross-continental comparison is conducted between three of the most noticeable PPP markets (i.e. the United Kingdom, Australia and China) about their VfM assessment. The institutional level is interpreted by a social, economic and political framework, and the methodological level is elucidated through a qualitative and quantitative VfM assessment.

There are individual institutional characteristics that have shaped the way each country assesses VfM. For the methodological level, we identify that: (1) these global markets use a public sector comparator as the benchmark in VfM assessment; (2) ambiguous qualitative assessment is conducted only against PPPs to strengthen their policy development; (3) Australia's priority is in service provision whereas that of the UK and China is project finance and production; and (4) all markets are seeking an amelioration of existing controversial VfM assessments so that purported VfM relates to project lifecycles. As such, an option framework is proposed to make headway towards a sensible selection of infrastructure procurement approaches in the post COVID-19 era.

This study addresses a current void of enhancing the decision-making process for using PPPs within today's changing environment and then opens up an avenue for future empirical research to examine the option framework and ensuing VfM decisions. Practically, it presents a holistic VfM landscape for public sector procurers that aim to engage with PPPs for their infrastructure interventions.

Across societies, gendered climate response decisions remain top-down and have limited progress because the influenced risk dynamics and their interrelations are not adequately understood. This study aims to address this gap by proposing an interdisciplinary innovative method, called women climate vulnerability (WCV) index, for measuring and comparing a diverse range of risks that threaten to undermine the adaptive capacity and resilience of rural women.

This paper builds on the literature to identify 12 risk categories across physical, economic and political sectors that affect rural women. These categories and attendant 51 risk indicators form the WCV index. A case study in Ben Tre Province (Vietnam) was used to demonstrate the application of the WCV methodology to rural contexts. The authors combined empirical, survey and secondary data from different sources to form data on the indicators. Structured expert judgment was used to address data gaps. Empirical and expert data were combined using a few weighting steps and a comprehensive coding system was developed to ensure objective evaluation.

The WCV assessment results reveal a reasonably worrisome picture of women’s vulnerability in Ben Tre as top highest-likelihood and deepest-impact risks predominate in physical and economic risk sectors. Stability, human security and governance categories have lowest scores, demonstrating a fairly politically favourable condition in the province. The medium risk scores captured in land and infrastructure categories reveal promising determinants of the adaptation of women in this rural province. The results demonstrate the usefulness of the WCV index in collecting bottom-up data, evaluating a wide variety of risks that rural women face and pinpointing priority areas that need to be addressed.

The WCV is systematic, customisable and localised. It combines field research and empirical data through structured expert judgment, thus enables researchers to fill data gaps and to do evidence-based assessment about diverse risk vulnerabilities. By doing so, the WCV index gives critical insights into the challenges that rural women face. This enables local governments to better understand cross-sectoral risks, pinpoint priority areas of action and timely channel funding and policy resources to support women where they need it most.

Waqf (Islamic endowment) in the form of cash is important to address the problem of developing idle waqf lands. Although there are various existing models of cash waqf, there is still a need for innovative cash waqf models. This paper aims to offer an alternative mode of financing for developing idle waqf lands using the concepts of cooperatives and waqf.

The present study first evaluates relevant literature on financing issues faced by waqf institutions in developing idle waqf lands as well as existing models of cash waqf. Based on the prevailing gap in cash waqf models, the study proposes a hybrid model of cooperative-waqf to finance idle waqf lands in Malaysia.

The proposed model is unique owing to the new dimension of membership being embedded into the waqf project. It considers donors as members of the waqf project, which is funded through the cash waqf collected, and thus, donors are given the privilege to receive benefits from the commercialised projects that are developed on the waqf lands. The existing models of cash waqf use traditional methods in which donors merely contribute cash waqf without any awareness of how the contributions are utilised. Usually, this problem occurs due to the lack of reciprocal communication between cash waqf donors and waqf institutions.

The present study examines the case of waqf land development in the context of Malaysia only. Secondly, the paper does not contain any empirical analysis, and the development of the paper is based on existing literature that discusses various models of cash waqf practised in Muslim-majority and -minority countries. Future research can conduct surveys of donors and other stakeholders on the practicality of the model.

It is expected that the proposed cooperative-waqf model will be able to create a synchronised relationship between cash waqf donors and waqf institutions and hence boost participation in developing waqf lands.

The present study adds to the existing literature in the area of waqf and cash waqf models, especially the application of this instrument in the context of Malaysia. It also offers a new hybrid model to the State Islamic Religious Councils (SIRCs) – Malaysia’s sole trustee of waqf assets management – such that the implementation of the proposed model could boost the collection of cash waqf in developing commercial projects on idle waqf lands.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the weaknesses of governance institutions in constraining grand corruption arising from the government procurement of large foreign-funded infrastructure projects in the Philippines. The weaknesses are revealed in the description and analysis of two major scandals, namely, the construction of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant during the Marcos era and the National Broadband Network project of the Arroyo presidency.

This research employs a historical and comparative case approach to explore patterns of grand corruption and their resolution. Primary and secondary data sources including court decisions, congressional records, journal articles and newspaper reports are used to construct the narratives for each case.

Top-level executive agreements that do not require competitive public bidding provide an opportunity for grand corruption. Such agreements encourage the formation of corrupt rent-seeking relationships involving the selling firm, brokers, politicians and top-level government executives. Closure of cases of grand corruption is a serious problem that involves an incoherent and politically vulnerable prosecutorial and justice system.

This paper aims to contribute to research on grand corruption involving the executive branch in the Philippines, particularly in the procurement of large, foreign-funded government projects. It examines allegations of improprieties in government project contracting and the politics of resolving corruption scandals through the justice system.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a systematic literature review of studies addressing relational quality in public–private partnerships (PPPs). The ambition of this study is twofold: first, to present more clarity regarding the definition of the concept. Second, to develop a framework that explains the antecedents, characteristics and outcomes of relational quality in PPPs.

A systematic literature review of 99 academic articles, which were analyzed and coded on the definition, characteristics, antecedents and outcomes of relational quality.

The study shows that trust, communication, commitment, openness and reciprocity are considered core aspects of the concept. The analysis further identifies important antecedents (e.g. shared values, leadership) and outcomes (performance, innovation) of relational quality in PPPs. The findings result in the development of a framework on relational quality in PPPs to be used for further research.

The findings indicate that relational quality is valuable for the functioning of PPPs, but the current focus of this review excludes studies addressing relational quality in other types of collaboration and public–private exchange. The lessons from these research fields might further improve people’s understanding of relational quality.

Practitioners should pay attention to relational quality in long-term PPPs. Among others, (process) management activities might contribute to relational quality as it stimulates communication and openness.

The presented framework explaining antecedents, characteristics and outcomes of relational quality allows for more structured use of this concept in future research.

Due to the uniqueness of individual construction projects, identifying the dominant risk factors is needed for risk mitigation in ongoing and future projects. This study aims to identify the dominant construction supply chain risk (CSCR) factors, based on studies conducted between 2002 and 2022.

The study adopts the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis (PRISMA) procedure to identify, screen and select relevant articles in order to provide a bibliography and annotation of the prevalent risks in the supply chains. A descriptive analysis of the findings then follows.

The study’s findings have highlighted the three most prevalent risks in the construction supply chain (poor communication across project teams, changes in foreign currency rate, unfavorable climate conditions) as reported in literature, that project teams need to pay closer attention to and take proactive steps to mitigate.

Due to limitations imposed by the chosen research methodology, tools, time frame and article availability, the study was unable to examine all CSCR-related papers.

The results will serve as a useful roadmap for risk/supply chain managers in the construction industry to take strategically proactive steps towards allocating resources for CSCR mitigation efforts.

Context-specific research on the impact of social and cultural risks on the construction supply chain would be beneficial, due to emerging social network risk factors and the complex socio-cultural settings.

There is presently no study that has reviewed extant studies to identify and compile the dominant risk factors (DRFs) associated with the supply chain of construction projects for ranking in the supply chain risk management process.

The research problem in this study is how a client (as a project owner) should organise early stakeholder involvement and integration in the front-end phase of a project. This study aims to create normative managerial statements as propositions from the client's perspective and to combine them into a set of activities enabling efficient organisation in the front-end phase of a hospital construction project.

Action design research (ADR) was carried out in a large hospital construction project where the first author acted as an “involved researcher” and the other authors acted as “outside researchers”.

The authors created seven normative managerial propositions that were verified by the case project stakeholders and developed a managerial framework describing the client's essential stakeholder involvement and integration activities in the front-end phase of a hospital construction project based on these propositions. The authors have also depicted the subphases of the front-end phase: value definition phase in the client permanent organisation, value proposition phase in the client Programme Management Office (PMO) and finally development phase in the alliance organisation ending on the final investment decision.

The collaborative contract delivery model enables the early involvement and integration of stakeholders. It has been somewhat surprising to note the extent to which collaborative contracts change the client role in the project front-end. The results offer practical activities for how clients can manage front-end activities in collaborative contracts.

The case project offered a platform to analyse how the collaborative contract delivery model changes the emphasis of activities in the front-end of a project. One of the key benefits of collaborative contracts is that development, design and delivery occur partially in parallel, thereby enabling contributions from production to be included in the design and development. The benefit of having a real-life case under study provides the possibility to triangulate and analyse rich data, however limited by the qualitative case method.