Assessing risk dynamics in public private partnership projects

There have been many instances of unsuccessful public private partnership (PPP) projects. Traditional reductionist approaches to risk assessment appear inadequate to manage the complex and dynamic interdependencies which exist on such complex projects. Systems dynamics methods have been used extensively outside construction to assess risk in other complex systems and theoretically show great promise in PPP projects. However, interviews with sixteen senior construction professionals with experience of PPPs, while indicating openness to new approaches, revealed significant short-comings in adopting such an approach in this context. It is concluded that if systems dynamics is to be used as a new way of assessing risk on Public Private Partnership projects, existing dependence on linear methods needs to be broken through more education about the merits of system thinking.