Research trends, themes and gaps of public private partnership in water sector: a two decade review

This research conducted a systematic literature review by taking into account bibliometric analysis of public—private partnership (PPP) studies published from 2001 to 2021 in the water sector. This study carried out a three-stage approach involving data collection, filtering, cleaning, and pattern and findings of research. The study generated 541 articles from 14 renowned international journals searched within Scopus database, and qualitative analysis was performed to produce 332 papers focusing on PPP studies in the water sector. The results showed that PPP studies in the water sector can be divided into five thematic areas including (1) risks, (2) sustainability, (3) success factors, (4) privatization, and (5) governance. The finding of this study reveals that scholars are interested in risk factors, risk allocation, risk mitigation and a number of success factors. On the other hand, the themes related to sustainability and typical governance models are found to remain limited.