The Stakes Are Asymmetric
Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have grown over three decades from a niche UK financing experiment into a mainstream procurement instrument used across more than 130 developing countries, now contributing an estimated 15–20% of total infrastructure investment in emerging economies, with hundreds of billions of dollars mobilized annually from private sources for public needs.
When PPPs don’t work, the failure mode is unusual. Unlike conventional procurement, where a bad contract typically produces a cost overrun or a delay, a failed PPP imposes costs that persist for decades. Because PPPs bind public and private parties together for 20–30 years or longer, an error made at the design stage doesn’t surface once; it recurs every year for the life of the contract.
30%
of 1,000+ LatAm concessions (1985–2000) were renegotiated
74%
renegotiation rate in water concessions specifically
3.5 years
average for government-led renegotiations
Toll road concessions renegotiated after over-optimistic traffic forecasts. UK hospital PPPs locked into inflexible service contracts. Water concessions collapsing when tariffs became politically unsustainable. None of these are failures of the PPP instrument itself; they are failures of preparation, governance, and institutional capability around it.
“It is not the sophistication of the contracts, the depth of the private sector market, or even the quality of individual projects. It is the organizational capability of the government institutions responsible for the program.”
Jan-Willem Middelburg — Building Better Partnerships
The Critical Success Factors the Research Converges On
The “Pioneer Project” Trap
A jurisdiction’s first major PPP, backed by intensive external advisory support, performs well. Encouraged, the government moves to a second and third transaction without embedding those lessons into institutional process. Preparation gets rushed; risk allocation gets copied without checking fit; contract management capability is spread too thin. This “one step forward, two steps back” pattern is the gap between project success and program capability, and closing it is the entire purpose of a maturity-based approach.
Inside the PPP Maturity Framework
The PPPMF’s architecture comes from the maturity-model tradition pioneered by Watts Humphrey at Carnegie Mellon, later generalized into CMMI. Its substantive content comes from the PPP Guide produced jointly by the World Bank Group and APMG International, the basis for the Certified PPP Professional (CP3P) credential. The PPPMF is an independent model aligned with this terminology, not a World Bank or APMG product.
Critically, the PPPMF is not a project management tool. It doesn’t tell you how to structure one concession, it diagnoses the organizational infrastructure that makes consistently good outcomes possible across an entire program, regardless of which individuals are in the room.
Figure 1 — The PPP Maturity Framework: capability categories, maturity levels, and the improvement cycle
The Six Capability Categories — In Depth
| Category | Process Areas | What Weakness Looks Like |
|---|---|---|
| PPP Strategy | Strategy & Policy Management, Communications, PPP Management Function, Business Case, Program Funding | Fragmented, reactive activity with no coherent pipeline |
| PPP Governance | Governance Management, Decision Framework, Stakeholder Management, Institutional Responsibilities | Decisions made without authority/expertise; perfunctory approvals |
| PPP Framework | Regulatory, Legal, Fiscal Framework Management, Program Oversight, Sector Regulations | No clear legal basis for contracts; unstable investment climate |
| PPP Preparation | Screening, Appraisal, Structuring, Procurement | Projects chosen for political convenience, not suitability |
| PPP Execution | Contract Management, Construction Oversight, Financial Monitoring, Continual Improvement, Relationship Management | Well-drafted contracts that are never actually enforced |
| Supporting Processes | Performance Management, Reporting, Payment Monitoring, Talent Management, Dispute Resolution | Enabling functions missing across every category above |
The Five Maturity Levels
| Level | Name | Defining Characteristic |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Performed | Unpredictable. Ad hoc, reactive, dependent on specific individuals. |
| 2 | Managed | Project-level control; discipline not yet uniform across the organization. |
| 3 | Defined | Standard processes codified and consistently applied organization-wide. |
| 4 | Quantitatively Managed | Data-driven; performance tracked systematically across the portfolio. |
| 5 | Optimized | Continuous improvement as cultural norm; contributes back to global best practice. |
Very few organizations operate at Level 5 across all 30 process areas — an uneven profile is normal, and is exactly what the assessment is designed to surface.
How the Framework Gets Used in Practice
Assessment typically combines document review, structured interviews, and facilitated workshops, producing a capability profile that feeds a sequenced improvement roadmap. Dedicated PPP units, like South Africa’s National Treasury PPP Unit or the Philippines’ PPP Center, function as a center of expertise, a gatekeeper, a repository of institutional memory, and a credible counterpart for investors.
- 1
Where does our capability concentrate, and where is it thin?
Most institutions are uneven by category. - 2
Are we building capability sequentially, or just reacting to the next transaction?
The pioneer-project pattern is the warning sign. - 3
Can we benchmark and track maturity over time?
Without a baseline, “getting better” is an impression, not a measurement.
A Note on Definitions: PPP Is Not Privatization
In a privatization, ownership transfers permanently to the private sector. In a PPP, government retains ownership throughout the 20–30 year contract period, and the asset reverts to public ownership at the end. A hospital built under a PPP remains, throughout, a public hospital delivering public services under government-defined standards.
Why This Matters Beyond Traditional Infrastructure
For a Director of Digital Government or Ministry IT Lead, the PPPMF’s logic extends directly to digital and service-automation partnerships. The underlying question is identical: does the institution have the organizational capability to manage a long-term, complex partnership consistently, not just structure one cleverly, once?
Building Better Partnerships
Get the full PPP Maturity Framework. All 30 process areas, maturity level definitions, and a step-by-step guide from assessment to improvement in Jan-Willem Middelburg’s complete e-book.