Wijnand Veeneman

Managing Public Values in Public-Private Networks: A Comparative Study of Innovative Public Infrastructure Projects

This article discusses the management of public values in local public-private networks established for highly innovative infrastructure projects. It compares six Dutch projects in terms of conflicting public values, trade-offs between public values and preferred modes of management. Some public values were initially more important, but trade-offs changed them over time. Effective management of public values requires a shared culture rather than contracts.

From clouds to hailstorms: a policy and administrative science perspective on safeguarding public values in networked infrastructures

This paper analyses how public values are achieved in Dutch infrastructures and distinguishes four crucial stages in decision making processes: the advocacy process, the political process, the bureaucratic process and the provision process. An important conclusion of this paper is that the character of public values undergoes significant changes in each of these stages of the decision-making process, generally from more abstract notions to more concrete. With the level of abstraction, the content of the public value also tends to shift from stage to stage. We conclude that a balanced repertoire of safeguarding mechanisms should address the various stages.

Competing Values in the Management of Innovative Projects: The Case of the RandstadRail Project

Large engineering projects without late delivery, cost overruns or technical problems seem to be rare (Flyvbjerg et al., 2003). Illustrations of this statement are abundant worldwide (e.g. the French Superphenix project, the German Transrapid project, the Channel Tunnel, Denver International Airport, Boston’s Central Artery Tunnel (Dempsey et al., 1997; Bell, 1998; Altshuler and Luberoff, 2003; Flyvbjerg et al., 2003). The political and societal environments of these projects all ask for safe delivery on time and within a budget. A variety of project management tools have been developed to meet such expectations. However, these projects also have innovative elements, providing situations that implementers (e.g. managers, engineers, operators) of the projects have not met before. These elements require room for improvisation and interaction between implementers, which most project management tools typically do not provide.

Managing complex transport infrastructure projects in an institutionally fragmented setting

Complex construction projects face a dilemma: perspectives and interests of clients and project managers may diverge and even be contradictive. This dilemma is especially manifest in the management of the performance benchmarks time, cost, scope and quality. Administrators hold to pre-established benchmarks, while project managers have an interest in relaxing them, in order to be able to realize the project. When these two contradictory interests are not reconsolidated, either the benchmarks are not met, or they will be traded off in an uncontrolled way, which even may lead to project failure. This management trap is best to be avoided when designing the contract between client and contractors and the drawing up of the terms of reference. Due to the complexity that characterizes a lot of public projects, this is not always possible. With RandstadRail as example, we will show in this paper what problems may occur in these situations and how they can be dealt with.