The Comparison of People-First Principles and Iranian Public-Private Partnership Agreement: Similarities and Differences

Each Public-Private Partnership projects or PPPs (as they will be referred in this paper)are designed to assist public sector (authorities and governments) in overcoming theirchallenges in order to provide financial support for services and infrastructures’ projects.These special types of projects are forced to obey any given countries’ regulations andlaws to be accepted by the authorities. Iran (Islamic Republic of.) is not exempted fromthis norm and companies that are eager to invest in Iran’s infrastructures’ PPP projectsshould accept Iran’s regulations regarding PPP projects’ implementation and also shouldadapt themselves to these regulations and laws. Owing to the fact that PPP projects havebeen recently tried to be amended in order to be more sustainable, People-first Public-Private Partnerships or PFPPPs (as they will be referred in this paper) have emerged tobridge the gap between PPPs and economic, environmental and social sustainability. Thispaper investigates the policies (regulations and laws) which are adopted by Iran’sgovernment and authority in order to address PPP projects’ implementation. The purposeof this investigation is to evaluate the extent to which Iranian regulations and lawsconsider, facilitate or impede People-First PPP principles. The principles of PFPPPprojects are extracted from UNECE (۲۰۱۹) which is the most reliable resource of findinginformation about PFPPP projects’ principles. The related laws, policies and regulationsof Iran’s PPP projects are assessed and analyzed to find the potential advantages anddisadvantages of them to employ PFPPP principles. The results show that there are somedeficiencies that should be addressed in modified version of Iran’s laws and regulations.

Keywords:

Public-Private Partnership , Iran , Sustainability , Infrastructure , People-First PPP