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Learning from experience to improve future infrastructure public-private partnerships is a focal issue for policy makers, financiers, implementers, and private sector stakeholders. An extensive body of case studies and "lessons learned" aims to improve the likelihood of success and attempts to avoid future contract failures across sectors and geographies. This paper examines whether countries do, indeed, learn from experience to improve the probability of success of public-private partnerships at the national level. The purview of the paper is not to diagnose learning across all aspects of public-private partnerships globally, but rather to focus on whether experience has an effect on the most extreme cases of public-private partnership contract failure, premature contract cancellation. The analysis utilizes mixed-effects probit regression combined with spline models to test empirically whether general public-private partnership experience has an impact on reducing the chances of contract cancellation for future projects. The results confirm what the market intuitively knows, that is, that public-private partnership experience reduces the likelihood of contract cancellation. But the results also provide a perhaps less intuitive finding: the benefits of learning are typically concentrated in the first few public-private partnership deals. Moreover, the results show that the probability of cancellation varies across sectors and suggests the relative complexity of water public-private partnerships compared with energy and transport projects. An estimated $1.5 billion per year could have been saved with interventions and support to reduce cancellations in less experienced countries (those with fewer than 23 prior public-private partnerships).

Governments must decide how to allocate limited resources for infrastructure development, particularly since financing gaps have been projected for the coming decades. Social cost-benefit analysis provides sound project appraisal and, when systematically applied, a basis for prioritization. In some instances, however, capacity and resource limitations make extensive economic analyses across all projects unfeasible in the immediate term. This paper responds to a need for expanding the available set of tools for project selection by proposing an alternative prioritization approach that is systematic and feasible within the current resource means of government. The Infrastructure Prioritization Framework is a multi-criteria decision support tool that considers project outcomes along two dimensions, social-environmental and financial-economic. When large sets of small- to medium-sized projects are proposed, resources are limited, and basic project appraisal data (but not full social cost-benefit analysis) are available, the Infrastructure Prioritization Framework can inform project selection by combining selection criteria into social-environmental and financial-economic indexes. These indexes are used to plot projects on a Cartesian plane, and the sector budget is imposed to create a project map for comparison along each dimension. The Infrastructure Prioritization Framework is structured to accommodate multiple policy objectives, attend to social and environmental factors, provide an intuitive platform for displaying results, and take advantage of available data while promoting capacity building and data collection for more sophisticated appraisal methods and selection frameworks. Decision criteria, weighting, and sensitivity analysis should be decided and made transparent in advance of selection, and analysis should be made publicly available and open to third-party review.

Infrastructure services are significant determinants of economic development, social welfare, trade, and public health. As such, they typically feature strongly in national development plans. While governments may receive many infrastructure project proposals, however, resources are often insufficient to finance the full set of proposals in the short term. Leading up to 2020, an estimated US$836 billion - 1 trillion will be required each year to meet growth targets worldwide (Ruiz-Nunez and Wei, 2014; World Bank). Global estimates of infrastructure investments required to support economic growth and human development lie in the range of US$65-70 trillion by 2030 (OECD, 2006), while the estimated pool of available funds is limited to approximately US$45 trillion (B20, 2014). The past twenty years have also seen a shift towards decentralized infrastructure planning. Many subnational governments, regional entities, and sector agencies have been delegated responsibility for infrastructure planning promote local responsiveness, but responsibility for allocating funds often remains with a centralized finance agency (CFA). While constituencies may propose numerous projects, governments often have insufficient financial resources to implement the full suite of proposals. This report presents the IPF methodology and results of the pilot application to a select set of transport and water and sanitation projects in Panama. The report first gives background information on infrastructure prioritization in Panama, then follows with a description of the IPF in technical and implementation terms. Next, we present the results of the pilot and close with recommendations for implementing IPF to a wider set of projects.

This is a handbook designed to guide governments, public authorities and other interested stakeholders in the process of designing and tendering sustainable Public-Private Partnership (PPP) arrangements in the irrigation sector. It takes a practical, step-by-step approach in describing what a government needs to do in preparing and implementing a PPP irrigation scheme from inception. The handbook takes account of the various stages of the irrigation value chain and how to handle private sector participation in irrigation schemes of different sizes and types. It assumes that governments have already made the underlying policy decision to embark on a PPP in irrigation, and therefore does not dwell on the rationale for undertaking a PPP. The handbook’s practical aspects are contained in four, stand-alone chapters that follow an over-arching Executive Summary and an Introduction. The chapters are deliberately numbered to coincide with the four steps that a government should take in establishing an irrigation PPP: Preparation, Structuring, Procurement Management, and Implementation. In addition, each chapter concludes with a practical Checklist to help executives keep track of the necessary tasks in each step on the way to establishing a sustainable PPP operation. The chapters are designed to be read as stand-alone guides, out of an understanding that institutions using the book may already have completed prior steps. Nevertheless, it would be prudent for users to acquaint themselves with the entire handbook so as to develop a holistic view of the requirements for a full PPP project. Chapter One: Preparation is divided into two parts, A and B (each with its own concluding Checklist). Part A reviews the scope for introducing PPPs into the irrigation sector, identifying the issues that policymakers should consider from the outset in order to make the private sector’s involvement feasible with a specific irrigation project.Part B discusses the irrigation as a business. It contains a variety of case studies—the first time such studies have been documented—with discussion of lessons learned, PPP types, transfer of investment functions in developing countries, competitive bidding, and third party involvement among the subjects covered. Chapter Two: Structuring a PPP sets out the various tasks that must be completed to structure a sustainable PPP contract. Chapter Three: Managing Procurement examines how to select a private contractor, which involves such factors as the fiscal commitments to the PPP, to what extent the process should be competitive and how that might be conducted and managed, and what issues are peculiar to PPPs in irrigation.Chapter Four: Implementation highlights management of the contract and establishment of those management structures, monitoring, penalties and grantor’s rights, use of performance bonds, enforcement of customer payments, dealing with changes to the contract, and contract expiry and asset handover. The overall structure of the handbook is illustrated below. The handbook is supported by three annexes: Annex 1 explains how to use the Excel Options Assessment Tool, , and Annex 2 provides case studies of 29 existing or emerging irrigation PPPs.