Abstract
The October 2019 issue of Public Works Management & Policy (PWMP) caps what has been another stimulating and productive year in our ongoing coverage of timely issues affecting the provision of infrastructure systems and services. We look forward to another year of bringing our readers high-quality reports of research and practice, along with timely commentaries and book reviews.
In “Risk Factors in IT Public–Private Partnership Projects,” Ghribi, Hudon, and Mazouz link better project management with better risk management and contend that successful project managers need better tools to identify and assess project risks. This article analyzes risk factors in three IT projects undertaken by the Tunisian government in partnership with IT and engineering companies. The results reveal 13 specific risk factors, which are grouped into three generic risk factor categories: strategic, operational, and key-resources.
A comparative case study of two Dutch initiatives to explore new forms of collaboration with nongovernmental actors is presented by Sanne Grotenbreg in “The U-Turn in Government Facilitation: How Dutch Water Authorities Facilitate Nongovernmental Initiatives.” The article describes how and why institutional strategy regarding nongovernmental partners changes over time and shows that a U-turn-shaped pattern emerges where government authorities moved from partnering, to limited facilitation, and subsequently reverted to invitational facilitation. She concludes that government facilitation is a dynamic, interactive process where authorities adapt their strategy to the initiative at hand and are pragmatic in their approach.
The repeal of prevailing wage laws has been shown to lower wages and benefits—including benefits providing safety training and associated with worker retention in construction. In “The Effect of Prevailing Wage Law Repeals and Enactments on Injuries and Disabilities in the Construction Industry,” Li, Zorigtbaatar, Pleités-Lemus, Fenn, and Philips test whether the repeal or enactment of prevailing wage laws affects construction injury rates or the prevalence of disabilities among construction workers. After controlling for various factors, they found that repealing state prevailing wage laws increases construction injury rates across all types of injuries by about 10% while enacting such laws reduces the rates of most types of injuries.
In the April 2019 issue of PWMP, Jordi Honey-Roses and Claudio Pareja presented a method for using percent billing changes as a simple measure of price escalation for water and energy utilities. Philip Q. Hanser has provided further comment on “Going Back to the Basics: Percent Change as a Measure of Price Escalation in Water and Energy Utilities,” that provides valuable insight into their analysis.
This issue concludes with two book reviews. Juita-Elena Yusuf reviews Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg. Most of the current discussion of infrastructure focuses on civil systems but as Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University, points out, social systems have an equally vital role to play in the everyday quality of life. In a similar vein, Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It, by Clearfield and Tilcsik, reviewed by Richard Little, demonstrates that many of the incidents that we routinely label as engineering or technological failures have their roots in organizational or cultural issues that often go unrecognized and unaddressed.