Indicators, Strategies, and Rule Settings for Sustainable Public–Private Infrastructure Partnerships: From Literature Review towards Institutional Designs

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper does an interesting review and integration of different evaluation frameworks, identifying an interesting set of indicators for the social and environmental dimensions. However, it stops short of developing a framework as promised in the abstract and even the title.

The analysis in section 3 is really good and identifies the more often used indicators and processes answering the first two research questions, but the review stops here; perhaps one can propose an integrative evaluation framework that considers what are the better indicators depending of the type of PPP.

Research question three is dealt in section 4 and has the ambition of moving forward towards a framework; But at the end they present the AID Framework from Ostrom and derive some rules difficult to apply. So the end contribution is unclear. I suggest to get deeper in the insights that AID provides to the indicators and processes, to end up building a useble framework for the evaluation of PPPs.

Table 9, which I guess should be key, it is quite unclear to me; it may require more careful explanations.

The conclusions explain what has been done, but they do not clarify what are the contributions of the article. What really do we learn from the study?

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

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Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

the overall framework of sustainability is missing (at least 4 pillars). if so, specify that it is only partial sustainability, even in the title.

it is very limiting that the review leads to only partial, non-exhaustive indicators. it is like the methodological approach, followed by others researchers, may lead to different indicators. if the objective is not to define indicators to measure (partially) the sustainability of PPPs' projects, then stop the analysis at the previous hierarchical level.

it is not clear, even in the discussion and conclusions, what procedural gains will result from the application of this methodology and whether, on the basis of the indicators highlighted, it will be possible to grade several PPP interventions in order to reach a merit ranking or to choose between several PPP alternatives on the basis of the ( potential) socio-environmental benefits generated.

minor editing in the text

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for your clarifications in the paper. I do not have additional comments

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have addressed the comments and provided clarifications when comments are not addressed. The reviewer finds the manuscript has been improved since the previous version. So no additional revisions are necessary.