Stakeholder dynamics and responsibilities in Public–Private Partnerships: A mixed experience

• One focal organisation for managing SH does not hold for PPPs.
• Ownership issues regarding SH management arise across all PPP stages.
• Allocating SH responsibilities results in balancing reactive and proactive SH responses.
• Dual governed and dynamic stakeholder management is suggested for PPPs.

Although stakeholder management is seen as one of the main success factors of Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs), to date, limited research has investigated actual stakeholder management in PPPs. After positioning PPP in the current stakeholder management theory, a comparative case study analysis of four PPP infrastructure projects demonstrates the relevance and importance of stakeholder inclusion in PPPs. The case study findings indicate that a PPP makes the stakeholder environment more complex to manage, due to the increasing importance of the stakeholder context and dynamics. Hence, allocating stakeholder responsibilities between the public initiator and private consortium becomes problematic as it goes hand in hand with balancing between reactive and proactive responses to stakeholder claims. In order to cope with the PPP specific stakeholder characteristics, the use of a dynamic dual stakeholder management tool is recommended as well as the identification of governance structures that allow the sharing and division of responsibilities between stakeholders.