Understanding of CSFs in the application of Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Toll expressway in Malaysia

Abstract

Expressways are extremely expensive to build and maintain. A major infrastructure project and services involve massive public investments starting from planning, land acquisition, grading, paving and other expenditure. As an alternative, Public Private Partnership (PPP) is a popular tool for the government to cope and meet the increasingly demand by capitalising on private sectors ‘resource and expertise. Given the inherent advantages of PPP model over conventional model, the PPP model was highly favoured and adopted for toll expressway development in Malaysia. Many studies have been made on PPP in the literature but very few have been conducted to investigate factors affecting adoption of PPP toll expressway in Malaysia. Thus, this paper attempts to register all these Critical Success Factors (CSFs) from available journal articles published since 2012. Twenty (20) articles were identified and all the CSFs in them were registered in one list. A two stage exploratory sequential mixed method design was adopted. The first stage was to list all the 161 CSFs that illustrated in the articles and qualitatively analysed them (using thematic analysis) and this resulted in reducing the number to 77. Then these 77 themes of CSFs went through of consolidating exercise into grouping them under the relevant Clusters. Overall, there are nine (9) clusters of criteria of CSFs that can be consolidated as factors affecting on adoption of PPP namely;(1) risks cluster, (2) governmental influence cluster, (3)project viability cluster, (4)organisational cluster, (5)economic and financial cluster, (6)legal framework cluster, (7)technology and innovation cluster, (8) social and environment cluster, and (9) trust cluster. The consolidated nine (9) clusters of CSFs list then went through a final stage of analysis for validation. A set of questionnaire to validate the degree of importance of these nine (9) clusters of factor affecting was prepared and sent to thirty (30) experts in PPP from three (3) main sectors; public, private and academic. The descriptive analysis was done by using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) Version 23.0 to differentiate these nine (9) clusters of factor affecting through their mean score. Finally, based on the group mean score value higher than 3.95, three (3) clusters of CSFs were selected as the most factor affecting in adoption of PPP namely; governmental influence, project viability and trust. This list is recommended to be considered in future studies of the influencing factors of involvement private sectors into PPP particularly on expressway projects.