As US president-elect Donald Trump looks to private finance to spur $1tn in US infrastructure investment, he and his team may want to evaluate the benefits – and the challenges – of other countries’ public-private partnerships.

One clear lesson is that governments need to pay close attention to contract structures to ensure private partners can be held to account.

There are potential benefits for both the state and the private sector from such partnerships. In Australia, Melbourne is about to get 65 new metro trains, in a contract worth AUS $2bn. It’s the largest single order of new trains in the history of the Australian state of Victoria and the state’s first ever public-private partnership (PPP) for manufacturing.

Unlike traditional contracts, under which the manufacturing location is chosen by the supplier, this partnership with the Evolution Rail consortium will ensure that 60% of manufacturing will happen locally, creating more than 1,000 desperately needed jobs.

“These [trains] are about more than just carrying more people, they’re also about giving people a good wage and meaningful employment,” says Jacinta Allan, state minister for public transport.

Job creation is key. Like the US, Australia has struggled with the decline in local production industries, particularly in the automotive sector. Ford closed its plant in October 2016 and Toyota and Holden will follow in 2017, leading to the loss of thousands of jobs. Not only does the new partnership specify local manufacturing, but further partnerships with Toyota and other local organisations will ensure that staff from the automotive sector are able to move into the growing rail industry.

The partners in the consortium to build the new trains include local companies Downer Rail and Plenary Group, as well as China’s Changchun Railway Vehicles Company, which will set up a new regional headquarters in Melbourne. Importantly for the state of Victoria, which has conducted 28 PPP projects to date, the consortium will face financial penalties if it fails to meet its commitments to developing local content.

Penalising private companies for failure to deliver on their contractual requirements is an important element of PPPs. At New York’s LaGuardia airport, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has embarked upon a $4bn PPP for the design, construction, operation and maintenance until 2050 of a new terminal building, designed to increase capacity of its existing terminal B from 8 million passengers a year to 21 million.

“The challenge in doing this project is that while constructing the new terminal everything has to run as normal,” says Magnus Eriksson, vice-president for Skanska Infrastructure Development, part of the LaGuardia Gateway Partners consortia. The partnership approach has accelerated progress on the project, according to Eriksson. “There is a lot of back and forth before getting to the point where you can start construction, but in a PPP that all happens in one go so we already have the designers, the architect, and the contractors at the table,” he says.

It has led to a more innovative design for the terminal. Bridges inspired by the New York skyline will take travellers to two concourse “islands”, which will enable more planes to enter and leave the terminal than in the existing U-shaped layout.

The local community will also benefit from contracts worth $679m, which will be awarded to small companies that qualify as enterprises owned by those with minority backgrounds, women, disabled people or veterans. Eriksson describes it as the biggest opportunity for small and minority businesses in the city.

Partnerships between public bodies and the private sector can also harness innovative new technology. One example is the recent partnership between Washington’s District Department of Transportation, Golden Triangle Business Improvement District (BID) and UK clean tech company Pavegen. In November 2016 three arrays of latest generation V3 kinetic pavers were installed on Connecticut Avenue, near the White House, where around 1,000 pedestrians an hour walk over the tiles. The system converts their footsteps into electrical power.

Ensuring effective operations is one of the reasons a PPP is to be used for waste management in the Brazilian city of Curitiba, where the municipal authority acknowledged it needed to be more efficient in managing the city’s waste.

At present, waste is dumped in a landfill site 30km from the city. Now, two new contracts will be created, one to collect and transport the waste and to treat it, which will probably involve building a new facility. The most innovative aspects of the new arrangement is that contractors will be paid according to their performance, rather than the amount of resources supplied; they will also be required to improve and invest in the city’s eco-citizen programme, created in 2008 to provide new opportunities for the waste pickers who make a living from landfill sites.

But for public private partnerships to succeed lessons must be learned from historic PPP failures. Poorly structured deals using more expensive private finance and overly optimistic user revenue forecasts have had disastrous consequences. One example is Mexico’s PPP road programme, which left users with some of the most expensive road tolls in the world and ended with the government taking 23 projects back into public sector control, along with responsibility for $5bn of debt.

It is a similar story with the South Bay Expressway in San Diego, where the private consortium filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and the highway was taken over in 2011 by the local state planning agency. More recently, Melbourne’s East West Link motorway was cancelled by the incoming Labour government in late 2014, at a cost of AUS $1.1bn, demonstrating the political sensitivities of such deals.

If the US, or any other country, wants to benefit from innovative partnerships for a new privately financed infrastructure boom it must ensure that benefits are realised in the long term and users get the innovation they are paying for.

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