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Public Private Partnership in Middle East

Fernando Pizzuti
Pictometry Middle East, Dubai, UAE
fernando.pizzuti@pictometryme.com


WWidespread geoinformation and communication technologies across the different fields of society and economy is a key factor that is boosting competitiveness, developing information societies, radically influencing many levels of decision-making.

The transition to a knowledge based economy sets new requirements to every sector of our society, demanding new skills, networked practices, and innovation potential from governments, businesses and services. As governments offers more online services and information to the billions of connected people, public awareness and use are increasing accordingly. Today, it’s difficult to engage discussion on geospatial activities without hearing comment and references to Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, satellite image availability, hence remote sensing, or emerging, new, Net-base services. The Internet is a multi-face technology that has the ability to transform and bring our traditional daily activities to new and unknown frontiers. Important to the millions of connected Asian users, internet finally provides an access window to general and geoinformation, shading lights to a powerful mass-reality and awareness. Bill Gate’s vision statement of the geospatial Internet: "You will be walking around in downtown London and be able to see the shops, the stores, see what the traffic is like. Walk in a shop and navigate the merchandise. Not in the flat, 2D interface that we have on the web today, but in a virtual reality walkthrough”. The geospatial industry is actively and relentlessly finding and providing new engineering solutions, tools and application to accomplish the goal to electronically explore, travel, study, and look at the earth from a virtual reality perspective. The world of geospatial data provision is changing rapidly with new revolutionary development of technology, globalization of markets, liberalization of markets, etc. For some of us deeply involved in the geospatial industry, the exciting electronic transformation has begun, for some others in the developing countries this transformation is just exciting as it is frustrating. In the recent times together with, Internet driven, rising awareness we have witnessed the successful stories of Public-Private Partnerships implementation, and how PPP has revolutionised and reengineered public sectors operations. This is true for most of the developed countries. Deep and radical are the differences with organisational, administrative and economic aspects in each region. Generally speaking, it seams that there is no doubt that Asian regions should need PPP’s implementation, where we find enormous needs to improve infrastructures, but it is difficult to generalise Public-Private Partnership success world wide. In the Middle East and especially the GCC countries, governments seem to be actively promoting PPP’s. Following the 2nd annual congress Public-Private Partnership on Infrastructure Finance in Dubai, the level of spirit that agencies are putting into play pursuing this scope is truly impressive. However, some fundamental key factors are missing or unclear - such as willingness to the change, policies and processes, leadership, management skills, future road to the transitional change etc. Moreover, while we recognise needs for privatisation and PPP’s, nearly at all levels of public service we receive different amount of attention to each level, based on internal beliefs of precedence. Water, Power, Telecommunication, Transportation are undoubtedly primary needs. No doubt that a desalination plant or the construction of a new highway needs all the necessary attention from public agencies, but related or correlated services do need the same level of attention. It’s wrong to believe that PPP’s, or BOT’s, more common to this region, need to be implemented to ensure success and maximising investment and returns only on multimillion projects. My impression is that one of the sectors being penalised by such way of thinking is the geospatial industry, this is because it has not been placed in the primary level of needs, yet.

Together with other authoritarian reports and case studies, the famous ISO Bulletin of July 2001, stated that “at least 80% of public and private deci- sion-making is based on some spatial aspects”. This statement startled government organizations urging them to deeply reconsider the value of this industry. In developing countries, such statements has at least underlined a simple concept: geoinformation relevant to our everyday life needs to be organized, searched, used and made available in an easy to access geospatial context. Question is: what happened to all the promotional or goodwill plans made in the last ten years for standardization, cadastre, GIS centres, national spatial data infrastructures, training centres etc.? While Asian institutions are still battling to find the route to a feasible change to traditional roles and trying to keep their mandates intact, continuous population growth is followed by urban development, real estate, transportation, telecommunication and all of the relevant utilities and services, that just can’t wait any longer on the slow pace of change in the public sector. Agencies at all levels of government organizations are still the main producers and owners of spatial information. Despite decades of constructive criticism, mostly aimed to improve products and services, the traditional monopoly still persists throughout the Asian region. Lack of collaboration between governments institutions form the first barriers to create knowledge base relationships, which later creates barriers for functional partnership with the private sector to create services that are beyond public sectors capabilities.

Here, there is an enormous need for collaboration and lots of constructive partnerships with the same heavy producer of spatial data and innovative solutions - the private sector. In this context, the public and private sector should work together to develop opportunities offered by the modern concepts of information and PPP’s, concentrating on activities that best suit their respective skills. For the public sector, the key skill should lie in developing policies on service needs and requirements, while the private sector should deliver those services at the most efficient cost and with best returns on investments. Finally it is not the production, nor the procurement, the security of the sensitivity of spatial information the impediment of public agencies to allow effective change and provide better services. The problem is to be found in the willingness of these agencies to “relax” on monopolies built in a time of steady government finances with little or no market competition. Understanding, that the realisation of geospatial infrastructures, delivery and access of geoinformation, derived products and services is part of a primary need, to catch-up with the future that is already here.

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