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Public–private partnerships (PPPs) have become an increasingly popular means of delivering urban development projects (UDPs) and have long-lasting effects on urban sustainability. However, private interests tend to conflict with environmental and social sustainability goals in UDPs. Through an in-depth case study of the Gu'An New Industry City, the earliest UDP delivered via PPP in China, this study investigates whether PPPs advance urban sustainability and what governance strategies in UDPs may help reconcile private sector participation with broader sustainability goals. The success of the Gu'An project suggests PPPs are promising instruments for advancing urban sustainability. Good practices extracted from the Gu'An project show collaborative partnerships improve efficiency, incentive contracts enhance effectiveness, and public participation advances democratic ideals. By developing a framework that links PPP network features with public values, this research demonstrates how PPPs might serve as an effective policy for achieving sustainable development goals in private-led UDPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) have been accused of importing practices and norms from the private sector that could conflict with core public values (e.g., accountability, transparency, responsiveness, responsibility, and quality). Some scholars believe that PPP renegotiations can enhance public values through ex post adaptation, interference, and monitoring, while others emphasize that PPP renegotiations incentivize opportunistic behaviors on the part of governments and other stakeholders. Focusing on China's PPPs, this study investigates how the renegotiation of PPP projects impacts public values in infrastructure service delivery through a Delphi survey. Two rounds of Delphi survey questionnaires were conducted with 14 PPP experts in China. The result shows that, in general, renegotiations can safeguard or even strengthen public values in PPPs, although sometimes at the expense of managerial values. Government-led renegotiations are more likely to increase public values than contractor-led renegotiations. This study contributes to the extant literature on PPPs by shifting research concerns from managerial values to public values, and from ex ante planning to ex post renegotiation. Practitioners can derive benefits from renegotiations by paying attention to their positive impact on public values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]