Identifying Factors Affecting the Sustainability of Water Environment Treatment Public-Private Partnership Projects

Abstract

Sustainability has recently been acknowledged as a crucial issue in infrastructure projects. Developing a model to evaluate project sustainability according to sustainability indicators plays a major role in promoting the sustainable development of water environment treatment public-private partnership (PPP) projects. Traditional sustainability assessments are mostly based on the triple bottom line (economic, social, and environmental) and lack a more integrated indicator system. To connect the research gap, this paper identifies 27 factors that affect the sustainability of water environment treatment PPP projects from five dimensions: economy, society, resources and environment, engineering, and project management using exploratory factor analysis. The fitting degree between the model and original data is verified by confirmatory factor analysis. The results showed that the fitting was successful. This paper makes two contributions: first, it provides a comprehensive sustainability evaluation indicator system from five aspects, laying a foundation for the evaluation of project sustainability. Second, this study defines a methodology to evaluate and rank factors, identifies the indicators that show the most significant impact on project sustainability in the five dimensions, which provide a reliable reference for the public and private sector to take appropriate measures to improve the sustainability level of water environment treatment public-private partnership projects.