Stakeholders' perspective on achieving project social benefit from Indonesian toll roads

Indonesia as a developing country has been intensively developing toll roads to support its economic growth through the Public Private Partnerships (PPP) scheme. However, toll road development in Indonesia is not quite following the plan. Despite the fact that they have been developed since 1978, currently, only about 950 km of toll roads' length is under an operational stage. Social problems in the form of community protest to the toll road impact are perceived as the main problem since Indonesia has moved from an authoritarian to a democratic country. According to the project success theory, the success of toll roads as PPP infrastructure projects should be measured by the overall stakeholders' satisfaction, as the ultimate success of the project has a close relationship with stakeholders. The community who reside adjacent to the toll roads who is also the user is very important stakeholders for the success of PPP projects. Therefore, it is important to consider community satisfaction as a success measure of infrastructure projects. Failure to accommodate the community needs and interests lead to stakeholder opposition that can reduce the chance of the project success. From the community perspective, a toll road is an infrastructure project that attracts public interest and has a long project life cycle. Therefore, it needs to become sustainable by balancing economic, environmental and social aspects. However, the existing PPP theory only relies on the Best Value (BV) Concept that mainly focuses on the economic aspect, less significant environmental based consideration, and almost no attention is given to the social aspect. This is perhaps the reason for the social problem that leads to the stakeholder opposition. Indeed, the ultimate success of a PPP project should be measured by how it contributes as much benefit as possible to the community as the end user. This can be done by including social sustainability as the success criteria of PPP toll road projects because this aspect is usually close to the community needs and interests. Project Social Benefit (PSB), which is adapted from the social sustainability theory, is important to deliver the project benefit streams to the society and to ensure the long-term viability of infrastructure projects such as toll roads. This research investigated and tested the PSB application as the social success measure in the context of PPP toll road projects in Indonesia from the community perspective. Attributes to measure PSB were investigated using a quantitative approach as well as the factors or constructs that influence on PSB, namely Project Design (PD), Community Participation (CP) and Government's Role (GR). Data were collected through some research steps consisting of a preliminary interview, pilot test, and questionnaire survey. Stakeholders' perceptions were obtained through the questionnaire survey involving 375 respondents from the government, private sectors and community using a purposive sampling method. A series of statistical techniques were used in this research consisting of mean analysis, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) test, post hoc test, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). It was found that the existing toll road performance was sub-optimal according to the stakeholders' perceptions, especially the community. It can be seen from the attributes' scores for the four constructs (PSB, PD, CP, and GR) which mostly were less than 4.00 as the minimum category of satisfaction level. This might happened as the four constructs had not been clearly defined and used as indicators to guide the success of infrastructure project. Moreover, the research found that the community tended to have different perceptions of the attributes' performance compared to that of the government and private sectors. It possibly happened because, in the existing implementation, the community has not been adequately involved in the decision-making process. The above overall conditions perhaps become the reason for soc al problems that often happen in the toll road development in Indonesia. In addition to those aforementioned, the research found that the government has an important role in delivering PSB based on SEM. As the owner of an infrastructure project, the government is a powerful stakeholder in the decision-making process in PPP scheme. The government has an important influence on community participation which led to project design and finally contributed to PSB performance. Therefore, the government should have a better performance to achieve the overall project success. However, it was found that the influence of the Government's Role (GR) to the PSB cannot be performed directly but should be mediated by the Project Design (PD) and the Community Participation (CP). Finally, the community participation was found as a channel to communicate the community interests and needs in the decision-making process that can improve the project design performance. It is suggested that community participation should be formulated as a mechanism for formally injecting people (in this case is the community) to improve the existing traditional PPP scheme. The current concept of Public Private People Partnerships (4P) can be adopted as the framework to implement this idea. However, since each project has different characteristics, the framework should be customised according to the project nature. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by presenting a new success perspective of toll roads by providing a more comprehensive theoretical framework to understand the success from the PSB Concept. Practically, this study contributes to providing guidance for the overall stakeholders, especially the government as the most powerful stakeholder in the decision-making process to overcome the existing limitations of the PPP concept by increasing the PSB in PPP toll road project in Indonesia. It is expected by implementing this concept, the social problem can be addressed, stakeholders' opposition can be reduced and a more comprehensively successful toll road can be achieved.