Assessing social responsibility initiatives for public-private partnership success based on multi-criteria decision making: evidence from municipal solid waste management in Ghana

Abstract

Through public-private partnership (PPP), social responsibility (SR) is crucial for developing sustainable public infrastructure for municipal solid waste management (MSWM). This study develops an SR framework for PPP success in MSWM. The study designs a picture fuzzy projection-based grey relational analysis method to rank the SR initiatives for PPP MSWM success. The study identifies nineteen SR initiatives from the literature and groups them into three dimensions: Environmental-based SR, Community-based SR, and Employee-based SR. Biodiversity and water protection, with a relative score of 0.8863, is the most important under the Environmental-based SR. Sanitation equipment provision has a relative score of 0.9095, and it is ranked first under the Community-based SR. Concerning the Employee-based SR, workers’ health and safety is the most important initiative, with a relative score of 0.8931. The findings inform scholars, companies, investors, and policymakers of the initiatives that need attention to promote sustainable development in solid waste management.

Keywords:

• Municipal solid waste management
• public-private partnership
• social responsibility initiatives
• sustainable development
• picture fuzzy GRA

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of The Key Projects of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 7153003), and Application of innovation promotion in service base construction in Sichuan Province of China (No. 2017IM010700).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).