Introduction to Special Issue of Global Project Governance

Infrastructure projects planned, designed, and delivered by civil engineers—water supply, wastewater treatment, roads, railroads, ports, locks, airports, power supply and telecommunications—create the underpinnings for public health, commerce, recreation, and administration. Developing and maintaining high-quality civil infrastructure is thus widely agreed by economists to be an enabler of both public welfare and economic development. Historically, in most societies, governments have been the primary financiers, architects and owners of this kind of civil infrastructure. At the same time, civil infrastructure projects are costly to build, involve significant levels of interdependency between project stakeholders, challenge organization and leadership skills, and often impact established communities in their paths. Thus, the governmental consensus required to invest in new infrastructure projects—and especially to maintain existing infrastructure—has often proven difficult to obtain and sustain. Underfunding of infrastructure development and maintenance has become a serious problem for developing countries that lack both financial and management capacity to fund and deliver infrastructure, as well as for developed countries with aging infrastructure that is typically neglected until it fails catastrophically, like the New Orleans levees or the Minneapolis highway bridge that collapsed in the last few years.

In this special issue, the development and governance of infrastructure projects is the focus of the eight papers presented. Within this overall focus, the authors emphasize three specific areas of importance to civil infrastructure development: alternative project finance; project organization and leadership; and the role technology can play to integrate project teams. The first of these topics, alternative finance, emphasizes the private–public partnership (PPP) or private financing of infrastructure (PFI) mode of infrastructure development, under which private sector participants serve not only as designers and builders—which has been relatively common worldwide—but also as financiers, concessionaires, and operators of infrastructure. This approach has gained considerable traction around the world in the last few decades. However, this approach is still in its early stages in the United States, with multiple, relatively uncoordinated experiments going on in each of the 50 states.

The PPP/PFI mode of infrastructure development is the subject of three papers in the special issue. Professor Michael Garvin has been closely involved with early efforts to adopt PPP approaches for highways and other kinds of infrastructure in the United States. His paper lays out a clear definition of PPP projects, dispels several myths about this approach for infrastructure development, and draws lessons from international practice for the design of emerging PPP governance and delivery arrangements in the United States.

Dr. Antonio Vives served as manager of the Sustainable Development Department at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). He and his coauthors, Juan Benavides and Angela Marcarino Paris, points out that there are many different ways to implement private-public partnerships for infrastructure development, not all equally effective in a specific context. His paper draws on a wealth of experience at IADB with the use of PPP approaches for infrastructure development in multiple Latin American countries to provide a contingent framework for selecting alternative modalities of PPP implementation, given both attributes of the project, as well as the host country and agencies involved.

Professor Ashwin Mahalingam turns the spotlight onto the challenges of developing infrastructure in developing countries. India’s lack of viable civil infrastructure has been widely identified as a brake on its potential rate of economic development, especially compared to China. His paper draws on the findings of five case studies and a 2008 infrastructure roundtable held in India under the joint auspices of IIT Madras and Stanford’s Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects. He highlights the critical lack of both financial and managerial capacity to develop infrastructure in urban local bodies, as well as a lack of trust in the private sector’s ethics; and he identifies the key institutional, organizational, and project-level bottlenecks that must be addressed for successful PPP implementations in India.

The second group of three papers in this issue moves the focus to the challenges of leading and organizing complex infrastructure projects. In the first of these papers, Professors Will and Levitt emphasize the role that knowledge plays in global infrastructure projects. The paper builds on a study of 15 global infrastructure organizations and their methods for exchanging and enhancing knowledge within their organizations. The paper highlights the importance of understanding both regulative and cultural norms when undertaking global infrastructure projects.

Professor Taylor continues this theme with his paper coauthored with Wong, Unsal, and Levitt, which emphasizes the role of learning in complex infrastructure teams. The paper emphasizes the challenges of working with multicultural teams and the need to have individuals who can bridge the gap between project cultures. The paper draws upon simulation experiments developed for both multicultural and monocultural teams to obtain an understanding of how these differences impact the learning cycle.

The third paper in this group is authored by Professors Chinowsky and Diekmann and coauthored with Mr. O’Brien. In this paper, the authors explore the use of social networks as a tool for analyzing the roles that individuals play within an infrastructure project. Expanding the traditional emphasis on communication to include issues such as trust and reliance, the paper analyzes the relationships between both social and project factors in creating a successful infrastructure project team.

The final group of papers in this special issue emphasizes the role that technology plays in enhancing coordination and communication in infrastructure projects. In the first paper, Professors Dossick and Neff provide an overview of an $11\text{-month}$ study to analyze the role that BIM-enabled models play in the communication process between project stakeholders. The paper focuses on both project cohesion and project leadership as key elements in building successful collaboration.

The second paper in this group is by Professors Harty and Whyte who focus on the digital media during the design process. Using the expansion of Heathrow Airport as a backdrop, the paper addresses the tension between existing work processes and the emergence of technology during the design process. The paper focuses on the changes in leadership requirements that emerge with the introduction of collaboration technologies.

In summary, the group of papers in this issue represents a cross section of the issues associated with completing global infrastructure projects in an environment that requires innovative funding while introducing technologies that challenge traditional leadership and collaboration processes. The editors and authors hope you find the papers informative, and use them as stepping stones to spur your individual discussions on the role of governance in civil infrastructure projects.