An exploration of the business environment of the construction industry of Negara Brunei Darussalam: in the context of public-private partnerships, privatisation and private finance initiatives

This thesis is about exploring the business environments which influence the construction industry in Brunei Darussalam. It aims to analyse the existing business environments after the crippling effect of the 1997 financial crisis. It also aims to identify the business conditions for public-private partnerships, privatisation and private finance initiatives to flourish in Brunei and the corresponding critical success factors and failure reducing criteria. Relevant literature for public-private partnerships, privatisation and private finance initiatives were used to identify the critiques on these models. Relevant literature on business environments in which these models have been successfully implemented were also studied. The research questions look at the business conditions of successful public-private partnerships, privatisation and private finance initiatives and try to emulate them in the existing business environments by identifying the critical success factors and failure reducing criteria. The difficulties in collecting data in this type of research led to the selection of the Delphi technique. The Delphi technique was carried out in four rounds and six critical success factors and fourteen failure reducing criteria were identified and ranked according to their importance. Retrospective interviews were also conducted to validate the factors and give further insights on the potential implementation of these models in Brunei. Four practitioners validated the interpretations of this research. The results from the synthesis found four layers of business enviroments in which government influence exist in all levels. The private sector and private support services are only present in the fourth layer and are not the critical success factors in the business environments. The thesis concludes by discussing methods to improve the business environments in which public-private partnerships, privatisation and private finance initiatives could flourish in Brunei, and the direction of future research to improve the business environinents for private sector activities in general.