Good Project Governance For Better Public-Private Partnerships

Since the financial crisis in 1997, countries in the Asian region had struggled to revive their economic growth and infrastructure development is considered as one of the stimulant. However, the required high amount of capital investment and the limited available resources to finance such development forced the government to search and implement an alternative approach. Public-Private Partnership (PPP) is considered by many and has so far been the appropriate alternative approach which not only allows better allocation for governmentís limited resources but also has the capability to ensure quality improvement as a result of private participation. Although a number of projects have been developed through PPP, however, quite a few problems still occur in this procurement system. Practitioners such as government agencies and private enterprises, as well as academicians have attempted to discover the most suitable and practical approach for this procurement system. Nevertheless, the search is still on-going. Moreover, projects that are under PPP procurement system are generally challenged with both p project management problems which require day-to-day supervision (short term) as well as partnership problems which require more of a strategic approach (long term), and that many have confusingly intertwined these two characteristics. Since PPP projects can be considered to have governance concerns because it deals with monitoring and overseeing strategic direction as well as strategic decision-making, this paper will discuss about the development of good project governance theory and how this concept can be utilized as a foundation to develop a guideline to help enhance the performance of projects under PPP procurement system. A systematic research through literature studies and interviews are performed for this purpose and a comparative analysis between 2 case studies in Thailand and Indonesia will also be discussed in this paper.