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Scaling up smart city infrastructure projects will require a large financial investment. Using public–private partnerships is one of the most effective ways to address budget constraints. Numerous factors have varying degrees of influence on the performance of Public private partnerships (PPP) projects; certain PPP factors are more crucial to the success of a smart city infrastructure project than others, and their influence can be greatly increased when they are fulfilled collectively. This study aims to find out what factors are unique to smart city PPP initiatives, as well as how these factors work together, so that successful smart city infrastructure PPP projects can be scaled up.

The methodology included three sequential stages: identifying the critical success factors (CSF) of PPP for smart cities based on an extensive literature review, collecting data from a sample of 90 PPP practitioners using a Likert scale questionnaire and estimating interrelationships among the CSF and their emergent clusters using structural equation modelling.

The best fit model developed in this study demonstrated the significance of each factor and their interrelationships within their categories in enhancing the performance of PPPs in smart city infrastructure projects. Five categories of critical success factors for PPPs in smart city infrastructure projects have been established: partnership and collaboration; financial sustainability; contractual duties and outsourcing; smart integration; and contract governance.

The proposed model represented the causal interrelationships among relevant critical success factors derived from literature, which may help in directing the organization’s attention and resources to more critical areas, leading to the effective fulfilment of the smart city infrastructure project’s objectives. In addition to the theoretical and methodological contributions, this study produced a usable and readily adaptable list and clusters of critical success factors for research in the area of the implementation of PPP in smart city infrastructure projects.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to identify PPP critical success factors and their themed clusters for smart city infrastructure projects.