Addressing the elephant in the room: How do we understand value for money in transport Public Private Partnerships?

Abstract

Value for Money (VfM) is often considered the criterion for assessing whether Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), or the traditional procurement should be adopted to deliver infrastructure projects and their services. Yet, this decision is mostly focussed on whichever approach that embodies a lower cost while neglecting the value it can bring to projects. Addressing this elephant in the room, a set of interviews with highly experienced professionals (with an average of 23-year working experience in infrastructure procurement) were conducted to engender an in-depth understanding of VfM. Through the lens of sensemaking, our results empirically demonstrated the duality of VfM in the context of transport projects instead of the previous foci on cost, time, and quality (i.e., traditional VfM), and further unearthed the nuances when considering them. As such, this research contributes to the PPP body of knowledge by providing a more meaningful concept of VfM. For practitioners and decision makers, it proposes a framework to benchmark their VfM assessments of infrastructure interventions.