An Empirical Study of Risks in PPP: The Case of the Motorway Sector

PPP can provide a variety of benefits to the government. At its heart, however, it remains the risk-management problem due to the high degree risks affecting PPP projects. Even if the topic of risk management in PPP has been widely discussed, the analysis of the literature reveals that risks must be analyzed and managed on a context-specific approach and that there is a lack of a comprehensive study on the more suitable risk mitigation strategies for each risk embedded in PPP projects. Focusing on a specific PPP sector, namely the transport sector, based on the results of a Delphi survey conducted with two panels of experts, the paper provides a guideline for both public and private parties in defining a list of significant risks in PPP motorway projects, preparing a practical risk allocation framework and identifying the most suitable mitigation strategies. Furthermore, results of the Delphi survey have been validated on a set of eight cases of road and motorway PPP projects.