چارچوب فرآیند مشارکت های عمومی خصوصی مردم (P4) برای توسعه زیرساخت ها در هنگ کنگ

Public private partnerships (PPPs) have been widely adopted to provide essential social and economic infrastructure and services. However, there is currently no systematic mechanism governing how social concerns should be captured at different stages of a PPP project. This paper, therefore, advocates a rethinking of the pragmatic issues underpinning public engagement and suggests a process framework that puts people as a major stakeholder for implementing PPP schemes. This public private people partnerships (P4) process framework embraces the bottom-up participative strategies which bring the public engagement clearly visible for infrastructure planning and policy making. With this newly developed framework and associated engagement strategies, decision-making power can deviate from policy makers, who are traditionally holding the ultimate decision authority, towards the citizens through proactive engagement. Such strategy can help improve the development process by moderating the risk of unforeseen oppositions, building clear responsibilities and rights, and creating opportunities for public inputs. It is anticipated that formulating such effective and genuine public engagement framework for PPP projects would assist government bodies, not only in Hong Kong but also other parts of the world, to better realise the changing public aspirations and demands for infrastructure planning and policy formulation.

The adoption of public private partnerships (PPPs) for the delivery of public infrastructure facilities such as roads, hospitals, schools, power plants and sewers has been a worldwide trend. However, various challenges have been encountered in some PPPs initiatives causing undesirable project failure. Of the challenges identified, stakeholder opposition was found to be the main cause for failure (El-Gohary et al., 2006 and Siemiatycki, 2009). For some PPP developments such as schools and health care projects, the public’s expectation for information and participation may not be very demanding. When it comes to projects of highly controversial nature such as railway or heritage conservation schemes, the engagement process is considered inadequate for the sake of governing democratically (Krawchenko and Stoney, 2011 and Lui, 2008). The interests and views of the general public are often overlooked in the delivery framework of PPP (Akintoye et al., 2003 and Majamaa et al., 2008). In anticipation that the private sector, with its efficiency and flexibility, may fit well in partnering with the public sector, the involvement of the private sector in public works might inevitably raise public concerns of rate hikes, social welfare, quality assurance, and dispute over transfer agreement (El-Gohary et al., 2006 and Reijniers, 1994). Scholars (e.g. Bennett et al., 2000 and Mumtaz and Wegelin, 2001) expressed the importance of involving people in PPPs scheme, i.e. public private people partnerships (P4) rather than a two-way partnership between the public and private sectors (Fig. 1). Public engagement is interpreted as getting the affected and/or interested stakeholders fully involved in the decision-making process (Renn et al., 1995 and Tang et al., 2005). In Arnstein’s (1969) well-known ladder of citizen participation, she emphasised that a real engagement is a full partnership with citizens. In other words, public engagement is a redistribution of power to a certain extent (Bloomfield et al., 1998 and Burgess, 1998). This notion aims to facilitate an information flow among different parties, balances their interests, and allows citizens to express their concerns (Booth and Richardson, 2001 and Creighton, 2005). Their input is essential to ensure that all critical issues are carefully deliberated and the decisions made have strong support from the community (Bagaeen, 2006, Goven and Langer, 2009 and Treatmann, 2007). Although the context of infrastructure development planning has intended to be transparent and a consensus-based decision, Hong Kong lacks an effective and robust framework for engaging the public during the development planning process so as to better safeguard the interests of all stakeholders (Anex and Focht, 2002 and Li et al., 2009). Local government remains keen on maintaining conventional top-down decision-making approach which has led to poor accountability and even political impasse (Lo, 2002). The recent debates surrounding a multi-functional development as well as an express rail link project have exposed the weaknesses in the public engagement strategies in Hong Kong (Tsang, Burnett, Hills, & Welford, 2009). If inputs from the community are to be successfully integrated into infrastructure development projects, a public engagement framework is needed to promote a more collaborative approach. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to establish a holistic public engagement process framework for PPP projects. The proposed framework was developed based on an extensive literature review and case study, and verified rigorously by an expert panel. A novel P4 model is established where the public participation is clearly visible for infrastructure planning and policy making. The current public participation practice in Hong Kong is first portrayed, which is followed by the research design. The development of the P4 process framework and its features are then discussed. Concluding remarks are drawn in the last section.

One key critical success factor of PPPs is the collaboration among the public sector, politicians, the private sector as well as the general public (Ahmed & Ali, 2006). However, a purchaser–provider model, i.e. by contracting out of a government service to the private sector with limited inputs from the general public, is traditionally adopted in PPPs projects. There has been a fundamental lack of concern about the general public’s perspectives in the project development process, especially for decision-making during the early stage of project planning. The current practice emphasises excessively on value-for-money from a financial perspective which may result in public oppositions. As there has been a noticeable lack of the crucial end-users’ perspective in the infrastructure planning and delivery, this study thus aims to fill the research gap by establishing a public engagement process framework for PPP projects, based on an extensive literature review and case study. The findings are subsequently verified by an expert panel. Consolidating the knowledge and experiences from local experts, this public private people partnerships (P4) process framework embraces the bottom-up participative strategies for each of the PPP stages and makes the public participation clearly visible for infrastructure planning and policy making. This improved framework is the vision and foundation to create tangible implementation of local economic and social infrastructure by involving the end-users’ perspective. It helps clarify, at a detailed level, how the elements of public views and needs can be identified and managed throughout the project development process. The elements put forward within the framework serve to tackle the complexity of public engagement in infrastructure development. Promoting the four principles: inclusiveness; transparency; interactiveness; and continuity, the process framework offers a checklist of the key issues to be considered and implemented for integrating the public engagement into the entire life cycle of PPP-based infrastructure projects. All findings from this study indicate that the public–private–people partnerships based development process gives flexibility and benefits to all stakeholders and helps create desirable infrastructure facilities. The P4 based development process framework has created possibilities for engaging new proactive and positive engagement methods and solutions, not only for the early stages of infrastructure planning and design, but also for construction, operation and management of economic and social infrastructure. Although this framework is not a panacea, it can be used to establish better risk allocation between political, administrative, developers, and the general public, and to create innovative and cost-beneficial ways to produce local community services. By applying this newly developed framework, the decision-making power will shift from the policy makers traditionally sitting at the centre, towards a shared-powered network of the general community. Such a paradigm shift is needed to reduce the risk of unilateral decisions by creating clear rights and responsibilities and offering openings for public inputs. A more constructive environment can thereby be generated where groups with diverse interests can join forces to define an integrated infrastructure planning. The P4 process framework can therefore be valuable to the public sector authority and private sector providers to effectively implement PPP practices by moving towards a more community-oriented service production. Since the framework is a conceptual model, further research should be conducted to establish whether those activities are appropriate and adequate. However, where a sea change in the traditional approach is required, we see a need for the developed process framework to be a prerequisite for effective public engagement in infrastructure planning and development process.