Institutions and infrastructure public-private partnerships (PPPs): How individual and organizational actors affect the initiation and implementation of PPPs

The extant literature on infrastructure public-private partnerships (PPPs) has considerably overstated the mechanistic requirements of PPP projects, the exogenous and isomorphic pressures that lead governments to adopt PPPs, and the importance of PPP- enabling organizational fields. However, this literature has overlooked the agency of individual and organizational actors as they navigate through their institutional environment to shape the initiation and implementation of PPPs. Drawing on ideas from the fields of project management, neo-institutional theory and research on the Gulf rentier states, this study explores why and how individual and organizational actors in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar seek to disrupt or maintain existing forms of project organizing.