Influencing factors of early termination for PPP projects based on multicase grounded theory

The public-private partnership (PPP) model has been widely used in infrastructure projects around the world to alleviate government shortages of funding and practical experience. Although the early termination of PPP projects frequently occurs in different parts of the world and brings huge economic losses, there are few relevant studies on its influencing factors. Most of influencing factor identification models are subjective and do not consider dependencies and feedback relationships between influencing factors. Using the data of 113 PPP projects, this paper proposes a multicase grounded theory and an interpretative structural model (ISM) to identify the key influencing factors of early termination and to analyze the hierarchical structure among influencing factors. The results show that there are 53 factors leading to the early termination of PPP projects, which can be divided into 19 main categories and 7 levels. Among them, political environment and natural environment are the most fundamental factors. In addition, a 3-level coping strategy is developed based on the constructed multilevel hierarchical model. The proposed methodology can be applied to risk analysis of early termination of PPP projects, and can help decision makers formulate strategies by considering the interaction of influencing factors.