A 1.5 day Roundtable to be co-hosted by IIT Madras and CRGP in Chennai, India on Thursday and Friday, April 4 & 5, 2008.

Roundtable Format: The Roundtable format is entirely different from and should not be confused with a conventional "commercial conference":

• The Roundtable is by invitation only and limited to about 30 participants. Industry participants and scholars are carefully selected to represent a tapestry of relevant experience and expertise. Every individual has a specific reason for being invited to the table!
• Leading up to the Roundtable we have a planning committee and a series of conference calls to frame the issues, the participants, and the agenda, which is a very important aspect of developing a successful event,
• In advance of the Roundtable we will produce a background document with partners at SDG and IIT-M to summarize several successful and several unsuccessful PPP case studies,
• The Roundtable is highly interactive, light on presentations, heavy on discussion and debate, but we do need a few presentations to seed and focus the discussions,
• We have a world-class facilitator to keep the roundtable discussions lively and orderly and a handful of academics, who are world experts in the subject matter to move the group along when a particular topic is already largely understood in the literature,
• To ensure open, candid discussions, we conduct the Roundtable under the Chatham House Rule, which basically says that participants can disclose information received at the event but not attribute comments to individuals,
• For the Roundtable to make headway, participants are required to stay and actively participate for the full 1.5 days, cell phones off, fully immersed,
• We digitally record, transcribe and analyze the transcripts to produce a summary report to recap the key trends, strategies and insights, as a final work product, that will lead to follow-on research by academic participants and becomes a strategy document for participants,

Background: Previous Roundtables hosted by the Collaboratory considered private infrastructure projects in the emerging markets during the 1990s, focusing on the relatively large number of distressed projects requiring renegotiation. Lawyers, business executives, financiers, and public officials examined the reasons such projects encountered difficulties (often related to changes in government policies) and studied the ensuing renegotiations and workouts. Today, after three years of examining such challenges, the community of scholars and practitioners affiliated with the Collaboratory has captured many of the lessons learned through the experience of the 1990s and offers a knowledge base that may be leveraged for the design of new Public-Private Partnership (PPP) projects and programs.

Objective: The India PPP Roundtable is being planned to merge the Collaboratory community with a set of leading thinkers from States, cities and industry players that are intellectual leaders in the PPP area in India. The purpose of the Roundtable is to facilitate a dialogue amongst peers in Indian states and cities, to share global experiences, to hear diverse points of view, to develop consensus around key PPP concepts and definitions, and to move the debate forward with respect to how to develop a more sustainable stream of PPP deals.

Research Questions: Roundtable participants will be encouraged to reflect on several reearch questions:

• How does each State view PPPs? What are their experiences and goals?
• Definitionally, what are the key PPP concepts, terms and models in use in each state?
• How are states shortlisting sectors and projects? What is the rationale?
• Why is their a lack of PPP deal flow in each city or State? What are the bottlenecks and gating factors?
• Are States putting into place PPP coordination agencies, or are they still approaching PPPs as one-off, ad hoc contractual agreements on a deal by deal basis?
• What can we learn from the more mature PPP coordination agencies in other countries? What are the roles and functions of such agencies?
• When we look at specific case studies of projects that have been approved by government but have not gone ahead --- which is something that we will do on day two --- what could be done differently? What are the levers to move these projects forward? What innovative ideas can we come up with when we put our heads together?

Roundtable Participants: Participation in the Roundtable is by invitation only, with carefully selected representation from relevant government agencies and sectors of industry, with about 30% international participation and 70% from India. We are limiting numbers to a small and select few to encourage real discussion and debate, and to create an intimate setting where participants are comfortable having an open and candid discussion. We envision the following participant roster:

• 12 to 16 key officials from 4 states and 4 cities that are intellectual leaders in the PPP area;
• 6 to 8 Stanford and IIT-M academics with expertise in project finance, public-private partnerships, global projects, institutional theory, organizational design, construction management, and law;
• 2 to 3 imported academics who are experts in private infrastructure from the procurement, public policy and political risk perspectives;
• 8 to 10 selected industry/multilateral experts who bring deep knowledge in setting-up PPPs from the investment banking, commercial banking, insurance, construction, and legal viewpoints;
• 6 to 8 IIT-M and Stanford graduate students who sit in on the sessions around the edges; they can be recruited for follow-on research;

Call for Nominations: If you know of someone who you think could make a valuable contribution to this Roundtable, please let us know. Send your nomination to mash@iitm.ac.im

Posted by rjorr at April 4, 2008 11:54 PM