Proactive contract theory-based resilience framework development for public-private partnerships

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are long-term contracts spanning many decades and are susceptible to failure due to dynamic changes such as crises within the contract period. The impending need to incorporate resilience to sustain the impacts of unexpected events on projects and contractual structures compelled this review of the PPP literature. This is to understand and unravel how and in what manner PPPs are undergirded by resilience. Using a systematic literature review methodology, a critical search from 1997 to 2023 for relevant publications in the Scopus and Web of Science databases yielded 71,601 papers. Further screening using filtering criteria and selection from 12 leading journals in PPP studies resulted in a final set of 116 publications, which were then analysed using NVivo. This analysis led to the organisation of contained knowledge to form a resilience framework based on proactive-preventive contract theory. The findings revealed that the primary layer of resilience focuses on keeping the cause of the problem from arising in the first place through flexible contract mechanisms, concession period optimisation, and governance strategies; the secondary resilience intends to interrupt the cause and effect through revenue guarantee options, financial viability and capital structure, and risk allocation and management; and the tertiary resilience is about minimising the damage of any unwanted occurrences such as crisis through conflict and resolution mechanisms and the renegotiation framework. This review synthesised the accumulated PPP resilience knowledge to be used by practitioners while handling the projects—both procured and in pipeline—through the reviewed suggestions and strategies.