Stakeholder management for public private partnerships

Various problems have been encountered on public private partnership (PPP) initiatives around the world that have eventually led to project failure. Stakeholder opposition has been reported as the main reason for failure in several instances. As such, capturing and addressing of stakeholder inputs is crucial to the success of PPP projects. Stakeholder involvement (SI) is an interdisciplinary domain that spans many disciplines (engineering, sociology, psychology, marketing, etc). The fragmented nature of knowledge in this domain is impeding project managers from leading successful SI programmes. As such, this paper presents a semantic model and taxonomy that represents the key concepts underlying stakeholder involvement in PPP infrastructure projects. The model has the potential to act as a core for knowledge representation, sharing and reuse in the multidisciplinary domain of SI. A portion of the model is implemented in a knowledge-base that can be used to recommend the most suitable set of stakeholder involvement tools to be utilized on a particular project. The recommendations provided by the system can act as a ‘short-list’ of potential tools to the inexperienced SI coordinator.