Planning in a public-private partnership: a case study of the Melbourne Metro Project

Urban transport megaprojects are important, albeit problematic, mechanisms of city formation. Initial development is often ruled by politics creating projects that run over time, over budget and fail to deliver the original scope. Yet despite these concerns, megaprojects continue as a dominant mechanism of urban change - what Flyvbjerg calls the megaproject paradox. The private sector, through public-private partnerships, is often engaged in an attempt to resolve this paradox. The delivery of these projects by the private sector challenges the concept of planning in the public interest. Can planning in the public interest occur within a public-private partnership and, if so, through what mechanisms? This question is explored through an auto-ethnographic account of the Melbourne Metro project. It reveals the tacit knowledge associated with the practice of planning within a PPP environment. It builds upon Flyvbjerg’s use of the Aristotelian virtue of phronesis as a value-rational framework to understand the role of expert judgement in achieving planning outcomes. The methodology deploys Latourian Actor-Network Theory providing a reflective account of planning in action, making explicit the role of things, such as contracts and performance requirements, associated with outsourced project governance. The investigation explores three matters that arose during the twelve months the author was a senior executive in the project delivery partnership. The detailed examination reveals how power was distributed and manifested through the Actor-Network and the roles played by a cast of human and non-human actors, including the Project itself. The thesis finds that no actor was free to act unilaterally to pursue their interests but must navigate points of passage with the other actors. Planning is shown as a relational practice where the public interest emerges through a dynamic process of settling matters of concern rather than through the actions of any one actor. The planner's role is seen as one of influence empowered by judgement as to what-can-be-done within a given context. It demonstrates project development as a process of social construction rather than an exercise of instrumental rationality.