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Due to the uncertainty involved in many complex infrastructure engineering projects, it is not always possible for managers to establish detailed terms of reference at the departure. Although the flexibility of ‘open’ terms of reference is often indispensible, it makes the arrival at a successful outcome much of a gamble. Complex infrastructure construction projects often include the tension that the values and interests of clients and functional managers diverge or even contradict each other. This is especially evident when managing the project management values of time, cost, scope and quality in relation to each other while the results of trade-offs and decisions can not be predicted. Client’s administrators defend objectifiable, instrumental values, while functional managers have an interest in relaxing them in order to realise the project. If these two contradictory sets of interests are not recalibrated, either the values are not met, or trade-offs may be made in an uncontrolled way, which can lead to suboptimisations or even project failure. Using RandstadRail as an example, this paper will show the problems that may occur in such situations and how unmanageability arises. A few lessons are derived to provide entrance to better manageable practice.

Sustainable mobility has proved to be a perennial challenge to realize. Scholars have argued that experiments could point the way forward towards sustainable mobility (cf. Loorbach, 2007, Markard and Truffer, 2008). In doing so, literature attributes a vital but complex task to those who engage in experiments. However, an important knowledge gap pertains to whether and how experiments contribute to learning about transitions and in what way they should be managed to break-up the more or less inertial mobility governance system. This paper aims to analyze how state-of-the-art literature on the governance of multi-actor systems considers experiments to contribute to transitions and highlight key dilemma’s that professionals engaged in the management of experimental face in the day-to-day management and decision making processes during the experiment. The paper will highlight these dilemmas and choices and illustrate their importance for experiments in the field of transportation and more specifically in the specific context of the Dutch mobility system and the TRANSUMO research program. Identifying these dilemma’s benefits practitioners who are engaged in the management of experiments to more consciously reflect on and include issues of second-order learning in the day-to-day management and decision making during the experiment to reach a more sustainable mobile system.

While hybrid governance arrangements have been a major element of organisational architecture for some time, the contemporary operating environment has brought to the fore new conditions and expectations for the governance of entities that span conventional public sector departments, private firms and community organisations or groups. These conditions have resulted in a broader array of mixed governance configurations including Public Private Partnerships, alliances, and formal and informal collaborations. In some such arrangements, market based or ‘complete’ contractual relationships have been introduced to replace or supplement existing traditional ‘hierarchical’ and/or newer relational ‘network-oriented’ institutional associations. While there has been a greater reliance on collaborative or relational contracts as an underpinning institutional model, other modes of hierarchy and market may remain in operation. The success of these emergent hybrid forms has been mixed. There are examples of hybrids that have been well adopted, achieving the desired goals of efficiency, effectiveness and financial accountability; while others have experienced implementation problems which have undermined their results. This paper postulates that the cultural and institutional context within which hybrids operate may contribute to the implementation processes employed and the level of success attained. The paper explores hybrid arrangements through three cases of the use of inter-organisational arrangements in three different national contexts. Distilling the various elements of hybrids and the impact of institutional context will provide important insights for those charged with the responsibility for the formation and key infrastructure and public value development.

—Hangzhou subway collapse is the most serious subway construction disaster to date in China. In this article, the management and regulatory questions the collapse raised are focused and a case study of Hangzhou subway collapse is given. By regarding the contractual arrangement as an outcome of a power game of principal-agent, the social causes and the perverse incentives to strategic behaviors of the key players are investigated to explain the particular project outcomes. In the end, some policy suggestions are given for improving the safety performance of subway construction.

In this contribution, we provide a comparative analysis of the Dutch government’s attempts to realize private investments in three national railway mega-projects: the Betuwe Route, a dedicated freight railway line connecting the Rotterdam harbour to the German rail network, the High Speed Line (HSL South) between the Belgian border and Amsterdam and the Zuiderzee Line between Amsterdam and Groningen, for which a private consortium led by Siemens suggests the use of Maglev technology. The privatization of the first two railway lines was attempted for during the nineties and beginning of this decade. In June 2007 operation of the Betuwe Route began. To date, the government has not succeeded in involving private parties in the Betuwe Route. Although the privatization of the HSL South has partly been realized by engaging into a complex mix of contract-arrangements, it has proven difficult to keep under control. Recently operation has been postponed until October 2008. During the project study of the third railway project, which started in 2000, government again tried to realize privatization while avoiding the mistakes of the earlier two projects. In 2005 government decided not to move forward with the tender procedure and consider alternatives. Building on theory and earlier experiences with privatization and public private partnerships we compare the three cases with respect to motives for privatization, strategies and results. We seek explanations for the way privatization evolved within each project and generic lessons that can be drawn from the cases.

The aim of this introductory conceptual paper is twofold, a) to clarify the relevance of the issue of public values for public management, especially with regard to infrastructure-based polices; and b) to offer conceptual clarification and the broad outlines of a common framework in order to facilitate and stimulate a meaningful and insightful debate during the panel session on the various papers that will follow.

Within public administration and policy sciences the concept of policy networks nowadays is well accepted. Not much attention has been paid so far to strategies aimed at institutional design. Therefore, in this article, we develop a conceptual framework to study institutional design more thoroughly. We do this by specifying the nature and variety of institutional rules that guide the behaviour of actors within networks. Given this categorization of rules, we identify possible strategies to change network rules. Next, we focus on the strategic context of attempts to influence the nature of institutional rules: the process of institutional design. We conclude with suggestions to apply the conceptual framework to empirical research into the forms, impacts and implications of attempts to change the institutional features of policy networks.