Identifying Factors Affecting the Sustainability of Water Environment Treatment Public-Private Partnership Projects

Huimin Li,Lunyan Wang,Lelin Lv,Shiping Wen,Qing Xia

doi:10.1155/2019/7907234

Abstract

Sustainability has recently been acknowledged as a crucial issue in infrastructure projects. Developing a model to evaluate project sustainability according to sustainability indicators plays a major role in promoting the sustainable development of water environment treatment public-private partnership (PPP) projects. Traditional sustainability assessments are mostly based on the triple bottom line (economic, social, and environmental) and lack a more integrated indicator system. To connect the research gap, this paper identifies 27 factors that affect the sustainability of water environment treatment PPP projects from five dimensions: economy, society, resources and environment, engineering, and project management using exploratory factor analysis. The fitting degree between the model and original data is verified by confirmatory factor analysis. The results showed that the fitting was successful. This paper makes two contributions: first, it provides a comprehensive sustainability evaluation indicator system from five aspects, laying a foundation for the evaluation of project sustainability. Second, this study defines a methodology to evaluate and rank factors, identifies the indicators that show the most significant impact on project sustainability in the five dimensions, which provide a reliable reference for the public and private sector to take appropriate measures to improve the sustainability level of water environment treatment public-private partnership projects.

Highlights

With the rapid development of economy and society, the problem of water environment pollution in China increases significantly. e government has been fully responsible for the investment and management of environmental treatment in the past decades, leading to notable financial pressure and challenging the government’s management ability
This paper provides a comprehensive sustainability evaluation indicator system of water environment treatment publicprivate partnership (PPP) projects from the economic, social, resource and environment, engineering, and project management aspects through structural equation modeling (SEM). is approach will further lead researchers to identify factors that affect the sustainability of other industry sector PPP projects
With the rapid development of economy and society, the problem of water environment pollution in China increases in severity

Summary

Introduction

With the rapid development of economy and society, the problem of water environment pollution in China increases significantly. e government has been fully responsible for the investment and management of environmental treatment in the past decades, leading to notable financial pressure and challenging the government’s management ability. Water environment treatment projects involve social infrastructure projects, such as sewage treatment, ecological restoration, and landscape greening; such projects require professional knowledge, and guaranteeing efficiency while completely depending on the government presents difficulty [1]. Introducing publicprivate partnership (PPP) into water environment treatment has gradually become critical. A private sector with valuable business opportunities can use innovative technologies and advanced management skills to improve governance efficiency and enhance the effect of water environment treatment [3, 4].

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Conclusion