Developing public-private partnership (PPP) in Nigerian railway corporation: The governance challenge

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are used in different countries in varying ways. While they have been used in some countries as part of the New Public Management (NPM) approach to improve public sector efficiency in building and maintaining public infrastructure, others have used PPP and other variants like Private Finance Initiative (PFI) to seek private sector finance and ease balance sheet pressure. In Nigeria, PPP has been adopted as a governance policy to solve the significant infrastructure gap occasioned by years of decline in infrastructure development. Part of this is reviving the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) which declined in capacity and operation for more than two decades. With Nigeria's history of governance challenges, which includes mismanagement, conflict of interest and corruption, this research examines the impact of institutional context specifically governance, on the development of PPP in NRC. Whilst much emphasis has been placed on the technical and project management aspect of PPP, there is little knowledge on the institutional context of PPP, especially in Nigeria. Drawing from institutional theory and institutional logics based on Andrews's (2013) institutional icebergs and . . . (continues)