Identifying and quantifying the challenges of Sri Lankan public-private partnerships: a sentiment analysis approach

Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) could be a suitable approach to cater the demand for infrastructure and the need to attract foreign investment in Sri Lanka, as it recovers from its worst economic crisis. However, the success rate of PPPs both locally and globally, is diminishing. Regardless, there is dearth of academic literature, especially empirical, done on Sri Lankan context to identify the challenges of PPPs that plague the PPP success rate. Accordingly, semi-structured interviews were held among the experts of Sri Lankan PPPs to identify the challenges of PPPs in Sri Lanka. Subsequently, considering the need to identify the most pressing challenges through a ranking system, while addressing the limitation of lack of PPP experts in Sri Lanka to gather adequate data to conduct a statistical analysis, Sentiment Analysis was done on the descriptions of each challenge, using pre-trained BERT model. The sentiment analysis provided numerical rating on the negativity of each challenge, to rank them. From the interviews, it was identified that Sri Lankan PPPs are being plagued by challenges like High Bureaucracy, Political Instability, Lack of Experts, and Lack of Co-ordination among Stakeholders, amidst others. Among them, it was identified from the sentiment analysis that Lack of Adequate Financial and Technical Capacities, Lack of Transparency and Corruption, and Lack of Legal/Regulatory Frameworks for PPPs are the most critical issues. Furthermore, this study explores the suitability of sentiment analysis and adopting BERT as a substitute for statistical analysis in studies where the responses are restricted by contexts and circumstances.