Developing public private people partnership (4P) for post disaster infrastructure procurement

Purpose – The paper aims to integrate relevant “people” into public-private partnerships (PPP) to establish a public–private–people partnership (4P) approach that targets more sustainable and better value for money post-disaster infrastructure projects. This recognises “people” as major stakeholders apart from the public and private sectors. This paper also draws on a parallel study of relationship management (RM) to counteract problems arising from multiple participants and to synergise the public, private and “people” groupings. Design/methodology/approach – Semi-structured interviews, questionnaire surveys, a case study and a validation exercise through a focus group meeting were adopted to obtain empirical data and develop the 4P framework. Triangulation research strategy combining literature review, interviews and questionnaire survey were adopted in the parallel study of RM. Findings – It is concluded that 4P has great potential to achieve the targets of enhanced sustainability and value of money in post-disaster scenarios. In addition, “people” can provide the “missing link” in traditional PPP to further cement the partnership and achieve effective and integrated partnership between multiple participants. Originality/value – This paper adds a new dimension to PPP in proposing the integration of “people” into PPP to address prevalent gaps in identifying overall sustainable value. It also develops a practical 4P framework to guide practitioners who may wish to test it, to whatever extent possible. In parallel, it provides a methodological and theoretical foundation for such public, private and people partnerships in post-disaster infrastructure development.