Public–Private Plan Development: Can Early Private Involvement Strengthen Infrastructure Planning?

Abstract

Private parties, who are usually involved in later stages of design, construction and maintenance, can potentially strengthen the early plan-making stages of infrastructure planning. They can bring in knowledge, expertise and experience to help address complexity in planning. Such early private involvement can be accommodated through several models for which experiences in Dutch infrastructure planning practice differ. In this article, we assess the potential of early private involvement for strengthening infrastructure plan development by examining evaluative studies and conducting interviews with public and private actors involved in four early private involvement models in Dutch infrastructure planning: market consultation, early design contest, market reconnaissance and unsolicited proposal. We conclude that in order to unlock the potential of early private involvement government needs to incorporate incentives for creativity, reward private involvement and strike a balance in the setup of the investigated models between conceptual freedom for private solutions and transparent public guidance in preconditions and regulations. Early private involvement could, thus, provide opportunities for conceptual creativity and innovation and opportunities for public–private collaboration, which can strengthen plan development.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. The authors would also like to thank Rijkswaterstaat, the executive agency of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, for funding this research.

Notes

1. In this article, we deliberately focus on early private involvement. Unlike other commonly used terms, such as early contractor involvement, early market involvement and early supplier involvement, early private involvement does not necessarily include a direct contractual relationship between government and the private sector.

2. MIRT stands for “Meerjarenprogramma Infrastructuur, Ruimte en Transport”, which translates as “Long-term Programme for Infrastructure, Space and Transport” and is an annually updated programme setting out national investments in the physical-spatial field (i.e. highways, waterways, railways, water management works, housing and industrial estates).

3. European procurement rules are specified in national rules, e.g. the Dutch national procurement law.

4. In 2004, Rijkswaterstaat introduced the policy “market, unless …”. This policy stipulates that private companies should be involved as much as possible and resulted from a neoliberal political trend to reduce government, which was continued into the current business plan (V&W, 2008).

5. In addition to the Afsluitdijk Renewal market reconnaissance, discussed later in this article, the model was also applied to the IJmeerlijn in 2011 (RRAAM, 2011) and the Project Mainportcorridor Zuid in 2007–2008 (Van der Does de Bye, 2008).

6. Mainly as a consequence of the new market policy, introduced in 2004, see footnote 4.

7. These include project managers, legal experts and planning experts from the public parties involved in the case studies and project managers, tender managers, technical experts and legal experts from the private parties.

8. This article will not consider functional-technical innovation in practice, product innovation (Russell et al., 2006), which includes the use of advanced products or the consequences of these innovations on the quality of projects. Product innovation differs greatly in nature and extent between the models, and as such, comparing product innovation in the models does not provide added value. Therefore, product innovation will only be discussed in passing.

9. It included dialogue rounds and staged selection of participants; see European Commission (2004). For more information on the application of the competitive dialogue procedure in the Netherlands, see Lenferink et al. 2011.