PPP PROJECT OUTCOMES

Recent research has focused on institutional impacts on the implementation of PPP policies, specifically the role that the institutional and political context play in the process of developing PPP projects, and mostly analyzing contexts with similar institutional traditions. To contribute to the current state of the art, this paper attempts to answer the question of how the institutional environment affects project outcomes in PPP development in the road sector through a comparative analysis of two environments with very different institutional traditions- the Netherlands and Tamil Nadu (India)- but with similar project volumes and a comparable history of PPPs in the road sector. The maturity of the institutional environment for PPPs was comparable when both regions embarked upon PPP programs. However, the evolutions of the PPP environments and project outcomes have varied across these settings. To explain this, we draw upon institutional theory and structuration theory, to analyze the evolution of the institutional environment and its influence on project outcomes at different points of time. Our results show that the institutional environment influences project outcomes and that context-specific factors shape the evolution of the institutional environment in different ways in different arenas, thereby leading to different project outcomes over time, even when th