Public-private collaboration: How private involvement can contribute to network performance

Traditionally, in infrastructure planning, private contractors are engaged at the end of the plan development stage on the basis of a request for proposals, after the conceptual design is finished and the main decisions have been made. They are responsible for final engineering and construction and, separately, for maintenance of the infrastructure. The government designs the project and pre-specifies the permitted impact of the design on the transport network and the environment. Early private involvement means that the private sector is involved earlier in the plan development stage and plays a role in the designing process. This can lead to added value for a project, the environment and the network in which the project is situated ranging from knowledge and expertise, to creativity and commitment. In the Netherlands Rijkswaterstaat is responsible for the network management of the main road and waterway networks. The best way to govern a network is not to disturb it when it is functioning well. However maintenance, refurbishment and extension projects are being executed in Rijkswaterstaat's networks. For effective network governance it is essential to know at an early stage the expected disturbances from project execution, the duration of these disturbances and ways to reduce the disturbances. Early private involvement could potentially deliver this knowledge and help to adjust and to program relations between projects as part of network governance. Several approaches for early private involvement have recently been developed in The Netherlands. In this paper an overview of these approaches will be given along with recent experiences from several cases. The approaches will be compared and discussed with respect to the way they can deliver added value for network governance and the specific conditions needed for this. It can be concluded that if conditions are set right early private involvement might be a useful instrument for delivering network performance. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer review under responsibility of the Programme Committee if the Transport Research Arena 2012