مشارکت عمومی - خصوصی واقعا چقدر می تواند برای حمل و نقل شهری در کشورهای در حال توسعه عملی شود؟

A few cities in some of the larger developing countries in Latin America and Asia have made increasing use of multi-year concessions or franchises, competitively awarded to private companies, for construction and operation of urban transport infrastructure and for provision of public transport services. In view of the strong prospective growth of developing-country cities with large transport needs, and the rise in the emerging economies of potential new sources of private capital, it is important to see how effective PPP has so far been in this area. The experience is analyzed principally by thorough comparative review of what has actually happened for some of the main users to date: Bogotá, Santiago, São Paulo, Seoul, and several cities in both China and India. Despite delays and mistakes that have been made in development of most of the projects, the overall results, already delivered and in prospect, are very positive and urban public transport is benefiting substantially, with significant side effects on poorer people's access to work and to services, air pollution levels and road accident rates. The widest and most important advantage of the PPP arrangements, as compared with more conventional short-term contracting, is found to be the innovations, technical and managerial, developed, and, in particular, the mutual capacity building of the countries' private and public sectors and their more effective interaction. The experience in the six countries covered suggests that other developing-country cities may be best assisted to develop sound urban transport PPPs more rapidly through provision of help on chosen items among 7 elements that have proved particularly crucial but sometimes weak in the projects reviewed: Civic consultation systems, Land-use/Transport strategic planning, Land/property market management, Monitoring systems, Progressive policies, Economic regulation, and Public institutional framework for PPPs.

Competitive assignment of enlarged responsibilities to private enterprises for development of infrastructure and services has been much discussed over the last twenty years as a promising way to improve transport sector performance. One thrust of importance to urban areas has been the promotion of joint undertakings between the public sector and private enterprises, for construction and subsequent operation for a substantial period, of major works such as subways, expressways or road bridges. Such schemes have become known as PPPs, normally involving substantial investments by the private partners and their financial backers. A variant with lower investment has been long-term concession to a private party of responsibility for maintenance and/or operation of a major transport facility or network, with remuneration from either user-paid tolls or regular payments by government for adherence to agreed performance standards. Another line of action that usually involves close public–private cooperation and has received much attention in the last ten years is improvement of urban bus services, including the introduction of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) services on major corridors. New PPP infrastructure projects in urban transport have remained concentrated in a few countries, in recent years principally China, India, Brazil, Chile, Malaysia, Poland and several other Latin American and East Asian countries. This type of project has spread to only a few cities in most of these countries and little at all to most other countries. Urban public transport reforms, involving private investment mainly in the buses used and ancillary services, have attracted effort more widely and the number of cities with BRT initiatives has grown sharply in the last five years. The spread of action has been helped by the educational and advisory work of some international groups such as the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), the Embarq subsidiary of the World Resources Institute, and the GTZ Sustainable Urban Transport Project. But cities' rapidly rising concerns about traffic congestion and its economic costs, air pollution and its effect on people's health, traffic accidents and climate change (ITF, 2011; May & Marsden, 2010; Mitric, 2011) all point to the urgency of more efforts to increase the share of urban transport needs that are handled by public conveyance or by non-motorized means, by adapting them better to citizens' needs and by charging individual vehicles more fairly for the costs that their use imposes. Bringing about these changes from ingrained patterns and habits is a very large and gradual process requiring extensive joint effort by different levels of government and by the private sector, non-commercial as well as commercial, in addition to collaboration with cultural and social leaders. Public–private partnerships, in the broad sense defined above, are an important dimension of the effort required. Reassessment of experience to date is appropriate at this time not only because partnerships, if worthwhile, do need to be activated in cities much more generally but also because financial bases for their activities are changing and may be able to evolve in ways that will make more resources available. Recent data indicate that the volume of financing committed for PPP projects in transport of all sorts (not only urban) in developing countries reached a new high in 2006 (some US $30 billion, more than three times the average annual commitment in the first five years of the new millennium), from which it has since fallen some 25%, and possibly further in 2011 (Izaguirre, 2011). This largely reflects the uncertainties stemming from the financial crises that have arisen in various OECD countries, one after another, since 2007. More important for future possibilities of financing investments in developing countries are the improved record of GDP growth achieved by most of the countries in the last few years, the recent transformation of numbers of developing-country enterprises into multinationals investing widely, the much-changed distribution of financial reserves among countries, and the trends toward development of new regional centers of financial assets and management located in a few of the emerging economies themselves (World Bank, 2011a). Based on a wide-ranging desk review of experience to date in the developing countries which have tried to develop public–private partnership initiatives of the types described, this article seeks to identify the broad lessons of experience so far and their implications for future work. Compared with available alternatives, major privately financed and run projects, giving service over long periods up to 30 or more years, have indeed been able to deliver in developing countries advantages similar to those offered in richer countries. But because the government institutions were often weaker these advantages may well have been more important: • to some extent in easing the resource constraints of local authorities, the financing advantage, • to significant degree in enabling competition more fruitful in terms of additional efficiencies, resulting from better division of risks, than obtainable through the contracting procedures previously used, the efficiency advantage, • and notably in introducing, and adapting to local circumstances, more modern techniques in fields from ticketing to land management, and sounder practices of maintenance and performance monitoring, the innovation advantage. As also in the richer countries however, PPP projects delivering these services often took a long time to prepare and sell sufficiently convincingly to needed constituencies. And even after they had reached the bidding stage some still suffered from weaknesses in the institutional framework. It therefore seemed that the most productive way to advance the review was to pursue main aspects of public private partnership development and design through more detailed assessment of what had actually been achieved in a few of the cities or countries which have gone furthest in use of partnerships for urban transport. Beyond this introduction, the article proceeds by very briefly reviewing (Section 2) recent urban transport PPP experience in the traditional OECD countries, both investment trends and efforts at evaluation of earlier commitments, before turning to the developing countries. Sections 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 introduce in turn each of the six broad design aspects and give main emphasis to succinctly analyzing the overall experience of one city or country which has achieved some success on the element focused, sometimes following problem-ridden earlier efforts. Section 9 of the paper draws the main conclusions from the overall study, emphasizing the need for substantially increased efforts to develop – in a rapidly increasing number of cities – the building blocks that have proved critical to progress in the cases studied.

Despite the difficulties encountered, Public Private Partnership has clearly made some substantial contributions to improvement of urban transport and sustainability in developing countries over the last twenty years. Among the six country/city cases covered in this review, it has had strongest and widest impacts in the very large cities of São Paulo and Seoul, confronting serious congestion and deterioration of public transport. It has also made a significantly positive contribution in fast-growing Guangzhou and has begun to do the same in the smaller western Indian cities of Ahmedabad and Indore. More generally, it has been an almost essential element in the important and widely appreciated efforts that have been underway to improve service through stronger intermodal integration: common ticketing, centralized financial management, real-time information systems regarding operations and vehicle schedules, and, in some cases, easier movement between stations of different modes. It has facilitated the spread of Bus Rapid Transit initiatives and has begun to do the same for efforts to accelerate the property development made possible by important upgrades in transport infrastructure. The large majority of the developing countries' cities and towns face a future of very rapid population increase and the possibility of rapid growth of production and income levels. Many already suffer from serious backlogs in the development of transport infrastructure and services, which hamper investment in commerce and industry. Central governments, however, often have great difficulty in finding financial resources to cover transport expenditures within the city, in addition to those required for the usually extensive interurban and rural networks. City and national leaders are therefore wise to consider the possible advantages of seeking support from private sources for upgrading urban transport infrastructure and services. Section 1 identified three types of possible advantage of private investment and it is worth looking at those advantages again in light of the evidence that emerges from the six cases. The financing advantage refers to the significance of the private investment in easing the local authorities' resource constraints. In our cases as a group, the private involvement certainly enabled a bit more local initiative than might otherwise have been possible and made sizeable contribution to the costs of expensive investments such as the Beijing subway lines, but the main cases where unavailability of private finance would have caused major delay, even abandonment, of the projects undertaken were probably the São Paulo Line 4 and Santiago urban expressways. The efficiency advantage tries to capture any efficiency effects obtained with the long-term concession arrangement additional to those which would have been expected under a standard purchase contract – such as the notional and quite probably important, but until now unmeasured, life-cycle costing effect. Decision-makers who opted for the operating concessions granted for subways in China, India, São Paulo and Seoul, and for the provision of financial and information services for the bus services in Ahmedabad and Indore, were implicitly indicating that they expected some positive effect of this nature. On the basis of their experience to date with the expressways built in Santiago in the first half of the last decade, Chilean experts do point to such positive effect. The innovation advantage covers techniques, skills or practices which are introduced as a result of the long-term collaboration between public and private parties which would not have materialized – or at least not sufficiently solidly – with a standard short-term contract. Actual experience in the six cases studied points to rather rich fruits of this type, but only partly in the simple form that might be expected, of techniques imparted by the private parties to the local public sector. The main fruits took the form, rather, of mutual capacity-building through working together to develop and apply tailor-made approaches, well adapted to local circumstances, in many fields, such as modernized, quality-oriented organization and management of bus service provision, real-time information systems on bus/subway services to meet the needs of both passengers and managers for verification and planning purposes, electronic accounting and communication systems for issuing and applying multi-use smartcards or tags and channeling receipts correctly, etc. Another area which has already delivered some gains of this sort and will likely be increasingly important is development of procedures and skills related to property development benefiting from transport improvements, as already developing to a small extent in Santiago and São Paolo and expected in larger proportions in Shenzhen. Sometimes the mutual learning areas were more in matters of general management practice, as, for instance, on monitoring of performance, design of user opinion surveys, or ways of consulting with the public. Innovation issues of one sort or another came up in all the countries and on most of the projects. Our review thus indicates that the PPP projects developed do yield very worthwhile results, already delivered in the case of most of the major projects or still to be expected in the case of projects that have suffered additional delays or set-backs such as the Santiago and Bogota bus reforms and the Shenzhen and Mumbai mass transit rail lines. But the record also emphasizes that, just as in the OECD countries, so also in the developing countries, PPP projects have necessitated long gestation periods. Moreover it has been all too easy to make quite serious mistakes, as in design of the payment arrangements under Transantiago bus franchises or insufficient upstream consultation with affected members of the public and potential users as in the early Santiago expressways. And opportunities have been missed, as for instance by the central government officials in China who apparently did not think of increasing the utility of their advice on transport/land-use planning by provision of concrete help to secure for one or two illustrative transport projects the appropriate changes in adjacent areas' levels of development density. If overall results are nonetheless so positive, why has the wider spread of PPP initiatives in urban transport been relatively slow, among countries and even among cities within most of the countries that have so far been involved ? The obstacles that have had to be overcome – reluctance of established interests to lose the degree of privilege or protection to which they had grown accustomed, time-consuming changes in legislation at different government levels, development of new skills within relevant government departments, attraction of new suppliers – perhaps partly from overseas – to an enlarged role in the city, smoother operation of many standard business and banking practices – are of very similar type to those that have been more widely resolved to enable use of PPP in other fields of transport. But the groups of people involved in the case of urban transport may well have been more numerous (even within an individual city, let alone for different cities), larger, and sometimes politically more significant (as appears to have been the case in several of the cities specifically examined). Bringing about the change therefore required higher levels of political skills of consensus-building and conciliation, and stronger commitment. It is more than a chance coincidence that almost all the most successful results that emerged in the current review – Seoul, São Paulo, Ahmedabad, Indore, and Bogota first stage – turned out to be the ones where a named leader had been prominently referred to in press reports and other assessments from early stages and hence had been picked up in our attempt to convey an accurate picture of developments. Further spread of effective PPP initiatives in support of urban transport improvement will continue to depend principally on the quality of the political process governing city affairs, of the candidates who present themselves for office, and of the selections by voters and governing bodies. Diffusion of knowledge about the successful developments that have been brought about by better public–private collaboration in provision of urban transport services will hopefully contribute to the quality of the decisions that will be made. Highly promising more recent initiatives by several cities much poorer than those mainly covered in this review – especially Dakar, Lagos and Hanoi – will soon be ripe for comparable assessment, giving the opportunity for special attention to what PPP can do when resources are more tightly constrained, and how much it can benefit the sizeable portion of the population that is very largely limited to non-motorized movement. Recognizing the importance of accelerated development of sustainable public transport systems in the developing countries' expanding urban areas, and the significant contribution that PPP initiatives can make to this aim, efforts should be increased to provide appropriate advice and substantive help to prepare city administrations for the planning and implementation of urban transport reform. Experience from the six country/city cases points to seven elements of particular importance to the development of successful urban transport PPP projects. Strengthening a city's capacities in relevant ones among these areas could make a real difference to the speed with which effective PPP action can be mounted. Civic consultation systems: Organization of initial participatory diagnosis of problem/s in a city or city-quarter, Arrangements for preparation and participatory review of proposed measures, and Redoubling of city/ministry verification of citizen viewpoint on the matter before final decision – as instituted for the bus reform in Seoul, and for highway development more recently in Santiago. Land-use/transport planning: Development and use of long-run (30–50 years) strategic planning for potential functional urban/metropolitan area (larger than existing jurisdictional area), with principal focus toward maintenance of a sound, up-to-date perspective regarding main public transport arteries and clearly defined land-use density patterns consistent with such network. Land/property market management: Progess on achievement in reality of the transport and density provisions incorporated into the strategic plan, and institutionalization of satisfactory mechanisms for transport investment budget to be credited systematically with developer payments of significant scale for the increase in property value achievable with higher density. Monitoring systems: Adequacy of coverage and frequency, and soundness of underlying collection and measurement procedures, for the city's regular monitoring of environmental, climate change, congestion and public transport issues, together with Verification of performance in initiation and execution of effective follow-up action in response to reports produced. Progressive policies: Identification of the key policy or institutional changes needed to respond adequately to the problems brought to light through the civic consultation system and other means, and of the steps needed to reconcile conflicts and achieve sufficient consensus across the city and amongst government bodies on a feasible program of action. Economic regulation: Urban tolls or congestion charges are seen as an early need in official and semi-official papers in all six countries, and several are already participating in research on the most practical mechanisms. Conceptual progress is hopefully being further stimulated by the thoughtful recent call of two MIT professors to make urban PPPs the highway to sustainable transport (Grillo & Zegras, 2011). This may be the key step toward more consistent approaches among countries to scaling of subsidization for urban public transport. Public institutional framework for urban transport PPP:Preparation of a major scheme is normally best done outside line institutions, by a small hand-picked team, dedicated to developing, through objective analysis and very wide consultation, a practical plan of outstanding quality. As the plan gathers support and moves toward implementation, responsibility needs to be institutionalized, probably along with some of its preparers, in a body, existing or new, with the legal status and experienced management necessary to secure sound cooperation from other public-sector bodies involved and with the private partners who win the bidding process. This body may most ideally be a Metropolitan Transport Authority. Existence of a sound dedicated law on PPP helps attract the confidence of possible private partners and facilitates sustained cooperation. An independent supervision body, separate from the line ministry in charge of the sector can help protect the interests of the state and at the same time reassure the private partner of fair treatment when the concession becomes operational. ITF discussions have noted that understanding and appreciation of PPP initiatives suffer, compared with other ways of organizing transport development projects, from lack of a sponsor who gathers systematic information on their progress and organizes independent evaluations of at least a few. Within our small sample the relevant national and local agencies, official and semi-official, vary widely in the monitoring and public reporting of progress achieved, probably strongest in Bogota and São Paulo and weakest in Mumbai. Better monitoring and reporting would clearly be in the interest of the transport management agencies as well as the private companies collaborating with them. It is much to be hoped that some of the countries' own evaluation agencies or independent local think-tanks will begin to fill the gap in thorough ex post evaluation.