NLP AND SNA FOR UNDERSTANDING RENEGOTIATIONS OF TOLL ROAD PPPs AMID THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

The Covid-19 pandemic has directly impacted Public-Private Partnership (PPP) projects worldwide. As a result of these impacts, many of the projects were renegotiated to assure favorable conditions for either the public, private, or both parties. Based on this context, this study seeks to unravel contractual mechanisms implemented or modified within the context of renegotiation processes caused by the Covid-19 pandemic in Colombia’s PPP toll road projects. Thus, this research aims to determine the impacts of the pandemic and the contractual strategies implemented in different renegotiation processes of PPP toll road projects. The mechanisms were analyzed at individual and cluster levels by implementing natural language processing (NLP) and social network analysis (SNA) procedures. These methodologies facilitated the analysis of multiple contractual mechanisms to identify the different impacts and common strategies between renegotiation processes. This research determined the main drivers and strategies to mitigate the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on Colombia’s PPP projects, providing a methodology to enable contractual and renegotiation analysis. Overall, the renegotiation processes revealed that the pandemic had an economic and time-related impact, with differences between processes based on the renegotiation initiator or project phase at which the process arises.