Introduction

Public–private partnership overview

Many developing and developed countries around the world face the challenge of meeting their growing infrastructure needs with limited fiscal resources. It is estimated that worldwide population will increase by approximately one billion between 2005 and 2015 (Sachs 2005). Large-scale development and maintenance of infrastructure will be needed to accommodate the basic needs of these new inhabitants, as well as those of the existing population. However, many developing countries receive less financial support from the World Bank in recent years than they did during the 1960s and 1970s for infrastructure development as a result of the multilateral agencies' shift in focus from infrastructure development to social program development during the 1980s (Harris 2003). At the same time, developed nations such as the United States have found it difficult to raise taxes to maintain their existing infrastructure systems, especially amid the economic crisis of the recent 2000s. Years of delayed or cancelled infrastructure maintenance projects led the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) to give a grade “D” to America's existing infrastructure in 2009 (ASCE 2009). It is estimated that $2.2 trillion of investment will be needed for the next 5 years to fix America's infrastructure (ASCE 2009).

In response to these challenges, some governments have invited private investors to participate in infrastructure development through schemes such as Public–Private Partnership (PPPs), Private Finance Initiative (PFI), and Build–Operate–Transfer (BOT) (Clarke 2000; Gerrard 2001; Lonsdale 2005).

Introduction

Today it is taken for granted that firms, governments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) will participate routinely in initiatives involving partners and resources from multiple world regions and time zones. For example, firms such as Google routinely undertake software development projects with teams of globally-distributed employees working together in real-time via web-enabled collaborative work-space applications. After the Asian tsunami in 2004, private firms, government agencies, NGOs, and international volunteers from more than thirty nations came together in a disaster relief effort of unprecedented transnational proportions. The Channel Tunnel constructed between England and France was a cross-border, public–private partnership among two governments and multiple private sector firms from around the world – including legal advisors, financiers, designers, contractors, and equipment vendors.

Few, if any, major projects in the modern era rely exclusively on people or resources from a single host country or sponsor. The new strategic environment for such projects is global, technology-enabled, interconnected, and dynamic.

Globally networked organizational arrangements are underpinned by technologies that have emerged since the 1970s for rapid human travel, information sharing, and interpersonal connectivity. Today a FedEX package can be delivered anywhere in the world in just 24 hours. The standard Windows–Intel personal computer system enables instant file sharing across boundaries of nation, language, and race. Mobile telephones enable instant communications without heed to physical proximity.

Technological progress has altered the relative efficiency and competitiveness of different organizational structures and strategies. Large, slow-moving, industrial-era hierarchies are losing their dominance (Walsh, Meyer, and Schoonhoven 2006).

Introduction

A CEO went to Okinawa for the first time. He was on vacation – to see the beaches, to experience the local culture, and to play golf. After the trip, a researcher asked him a question: “How much did the success of your trip depend on your knowledge of the local Japanese context: the language, history, culture, economics and politics?” His answer was: “Gee. Not very much. I had to count local currency, book a hotel room and I even learned a few words of Japanese and it was a good holiday.”

A second CEO also went to Okinawa, also for the first time, but with a different objective. He went to buy land, obtain permits, and develop a beachfront hotel and resort. Two years into the project, he was asked the same question and he offered a far more elaborate reply:

As indicated by previous chapters, an increased need for public facilities and infrastructural improvements of all kinds – transportation, energy production and distribution, clean water, and sanitation – has led to a rapid rise in the volume of activity in the international construction industry in recent times – in particular, in developing countries. As a consequence, we observe an increase in the number of large “global projects” that involve collaboration among participants from multiple companies and countries.

In addition to the complexities present in most large engineering projects, global projects are distinct from nonglobal projects in that the former involve the necessity to interact with individuals, firms, and agencies from diverse national and cultural backgrounds. As a consequence, participants confront a variety of institutional differences – including regulatory, normative, and cultural-cognitive disparities with which they must attempt to cope (see Chapter 2; Scott 2008). The existence of these differences presents substantial challenges to global projects, imposing associated “institutional transaction costs” requiring time, attention, and the expenditure of additional resources (see Chapters 1 and 5).

A case study was carried out to investigate the types of challenges posed by institutional differences in one large construction project. In addition to examining institutionally based conflicts, we identified some of the ways in which these conflicts were resolved and, in particular, the types of actors who were instrumental to their resolution.

The study of social movements has grown remarkably over the past three decades. From its modest beginnings in sociology in the 1970s, the field has expanded dramatically and become far more interdisciplinary in its focus (see Chapter 3). Yet for all the proliferation of research and new-found intellectual breadth, the field still bears much of the imprint of the period in which it emerged. The field developed apace of the New Left protest cycle of the 1960s and 1970s and in many respects remains oriented toward a 1960s image of contention and, as a number of commentators have noted, biased toward the study of Western-style reform movements (Almeida 2003; Boudreau 1996; Brockett 2005; McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996; Wickham 2002).

This bias persists in the face of two broad trends that appear to be shifting the geographic locus of 1960s-style protest activity away from the democratic West. Starting with Meyer's and Tarrow's (1997) volume entitled, The Social Movement Society, the weight of speculative evidence continues to suggest that the social movement “form” has been largely institutionalized across the democratic West (McAdam et al. 2005). Institutionalization has meant an increase in formal social movement organizations (Minkoff 1993, 1995), the development of “hybrid” forms of movement activity (Sampson et al. 2005), and a sharp decline in the kind of disruptive, public protest associated with the 1960s and 1970s (McAdam et al. 2005).