Airport Public Private Partnership Case Study

Haitham E. Khaireldin

Introduction

Public infrastructure projects have been traditionally procured by the public sector and to cope with the increasing demand for infrastructure provisions and to maintain existing services, new approaches had to be developed and adopted to overcome the shortage in public funding resources (Augenblick and Custer, FHwA cited in Abdel Aziz, 2007, p.918). Public Private Partnership (PPP) was considered as an answer to public funding problems and thus, this approach has been used widely utilized worldwide (Abdel Aziz, 2007, p.918).

The concept of designing an efficient facility is not new, but what is considered new is the effective engagement of partnerships models as vehicles for delivering such objective while considering value for money and whole life cycle approach (Grimsey and Lewis, 2004, p.1).

Following to Latham and Egan reports, there has been lots of effort exerted to promote and develop collaboration approach, which according to Fryer et al. (2004, p.196) has evidently improved productivity, profitability and value. Collaboration approach is meant to reduce waste, enhance relationships and encourage innovation.

The integration of design, construction, finance, operations and maintenance within a longterm partnership has essentially created a motivation to think beyond the design stage that will eventually result in decreasing waste and thus, lower running costs (Grimsey and Lewis, 2004, p.1).

PPP models are essentially, arrangements where private parties are involved in the provision of infrastructure and can take many forms and incorporate various features (Grimsey and Lewis, 2004, p.1). In that context, Germany does not have formal PPP programme despite having the private sector involved in road projects e.g. the Warnow tunnel (Grimsey and Lewis, 2004, p.1). Instead, Acts, rules and regulations apply with the most notable being the PPP Acceleration Act (Schaefer and Voland, 2009).