Environmental Impact Assessment Effectiveness in Public-Private Partnerships: Study on the Colombian Road Program

Public–private partnership (PPP) has been positioned as a relevant contracting method for developing large-scale infrastructureprojects that entails potentially high-magnitude negative impacts on the environment. The effectiveness of the environmental impact assess-ment (EIA) is crucial to achieving sustainable development of these large-scale infrastructure projects. To unravel the drivers for the EIAeffectiveness and the multiple combinations built by the complexity of these drivers, this paper analyzes 28 road PPP projects from Colombiaemploying a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) approach. This paper decodes conjectural causal links between specificconditions grouped in superordinate clusters (i.e., consultants’capability, project features, and communities’participation) and EIA effec-tiveness dimensions (i.e., normative, procedural, substantive, and transactive). Findings revealed that no single combination of causal con-ditions ensures multidimensional EIA effectiveness. This study demonstrated that EIA effectiveness relies significantly on the integration ofspecific features of three external stakeholders: consultants, nonpreferred proponents, and communities. This study constitutes the first em-pirical multidimensional identification of the combination of conditions that generate EIA effectiveness in road PPPs.