Institutional entrepreneurship and infrastructure PPPs: the role of social actors in Saudi Arabias Medina Airport

This chapter presents a comprehensive review of the PPP scholarly works that have propounded key CSFs assumed to be essential for PPPs. The review covers academic articles published in major journals of project management, administration, and engineering over the past three decades. The identified CSFs include factors such as political support, bureaucratic and administrative readiness, organizational support, compatible legal and regulatory frameworks, and technical, managerial, and risk-related factors. The chapter argues that, while PPP scholars continue to overstate the mechanistic requirements for successful implementation of PPPs and focus exclusively on structure (the exogenous requirements of PPPs), they have completely overlooked the role of the cognitive and social dynamics underlying the project implementation process (agency and capacity of actors to drive interest for PPPs internally). As a result, while PPP scholars prescribe what is needed for PPPs to work, they have not examined how success can be achieved within institutional environments where such requirements do not exist. To address this gap, the chapter builds on the PPP literature and connects it with a blend of ideas from the institutional entrepreneurship and inhabited institution bodies of literature. The aim is to develop a theoretical framework that unpacks the role of social actors and the strategies they devise to disrupt the institutionalized form of project organizing (EPC) and introduce a new project delivery method (PPP).