Front-end Decision-making For Xiamen Xiang'an Sponge City PPP Project Development

Sponge City is vigorously promoted by the government as an effective measure to tackle the urban-waterlog and drinking water problems.However,it is a large engineering system which needs a lot of capital to construct.Only using public financial investment not only brings burden onto the local governments but also hinders the development of Sponge City.The model of Public Private Partnership(PPP)can solve the financial problem of local governments,and is in favor of constructing Sponge City to support the development of cities.The payment accepted by the project participants is still the way of government paying future services because of the public welfare characteristics of sponge city.For nearly 20 years of operation period,it is a very important decision whether to enter PPP in the project early stage.The aim of this paper is to explore early decision making of a PPP sponge city project based on a case study of Xiang'an sponge city in Xiamen.The research contents include a strategic analysis of the project to establish the Sponge City development guidelines.Bottom-up work breakdown structure of the project management theory is adopted to clear the construction scope and project workpackages.Feasibility and necessity of Xiamen Xiang'an new town sponge city project have been conducted to meet the requirement of China's basic construction regulation.Qualitative and quantitative analysis of project's value for money(VFM)are examed to test the suitability of PPP in Xiang'an new town.Research results show that the sponge PPP projects is different from the traditional basic construction projects.The early decision factors need to be particularly considered are national policy and local macro environment analysis,VFM evaluation and risk sharing framework.The VFM testing results indicate that the PPP sponge city projects can be implemented in Xiamen.The precondition of dividing responsibility clearly onto government and private company is to measure the project scope accurately.Reasonable distribution and dispose of risk between the government and the private company are also the success factor for PPP sponge city project development.