An Evidence-Based Risk Governance Framework for Public-Private Partnerships in Saudi Arabia: An Uncertainty-Aware Prioritization Framework (Research Square)

Summary

• A 43-source corpus was classified and a 15-source item archive yielded 519 statements.p.2
• Fourteen recurrence-eligible sources supported normalization into 41 factors and selection of 15 risks for a questionnaire completed by 205 Saudi PPP stakeholders.p.2
• Political and security instability ranked first with CI = 0.5243 (95% bootstrap CI [0.4835, 0.5647]) and P(Top 3) = 89.2%.p.25
• Cost escalation and overrun had the highest mean probability at 3.42, and political and security instability the highest share of high probability ratings at 47.8%.p.22
• Coordination and communication failure had the highest mean impact at 3.72 and the highest share of 4-5 impact ratings at 61.5%.p.22
• Of 105 Wilcoxon contrasts, three remained significant after Holm correction, and Kendall's W = 0.0157 indicated a very small concordance effect.p.24
• The sample included 99 government respondents (48.3%) and 57 private-sector respondents (27.8%).p.21

Key insights

1. Political and security instability is the top-ranked risk, with a median bootstrap rank of 1 and P(Rank = 1) = 51.7%.p.25
2. Cost escalation and overrun ranked second with CI = 0.5173, and coordination and communication failure third with CI = 0.5151.p.25
3. Beyond the leading three factors, the rank intervals overlapped substantially, supporting uncertainty-aware reporting rather than a deterministic cut-off.p.25
4. Only three directed dominance relationships were found: R08 > R13, R01 > R13 and R03 > R13.p.25
5. The 205 valid records exceeded the descriptive precision benchmark of 196.p.8
6. Twenty-one (10.2%) records were straight lined, defining a sensitivity sample of n = 184.p.21
7. 104 respondents (50.7%) had 10 or more years of professional experience.p.21