Public Private Partnerships of Brunei Darussalam

PPPs2

Historically, Brunei Darussalam’s socio-economic growth was largely fuelled by government spending on infrastructure. Public-sector spending in Brunei relies heavily on the country’s large oil and gas reserves. This raises the question of how to achieve sustainable long-term investment, as oil and gas are finite resources.
During the time of the Seventh National Development Plan (1996-2000), the government reviewed the need for greater private sector investment and established that more significant contributions from the private sector would be possible only with substantial private sector growth. In a bid to solve this problem, the government invested in developing alternative strategies to maintain and improve the quality of public services. Privatisation is one such development strategy, first incorporated in the Fifth National Development Plan (1986-90), which remained at the forefront of government planning for several years.

More recently the Brunei Economic Development Board (BEDB) of the Prime Minister’s Office expressed the country’s commitment to creating public-private partnerships as a means of developing infrastructure in the country. This comes as part of Brunei’s Wawasan 2035 vision of developing and maintaining world-class facilities in the country. The use of PPPs in infrastructural development presents an alternative means of financing projects, on top of the National Development Plan budget funding. The BEDB is optimistic that, through PPPs, infrastructure development projects will become less reliant on the use of government resources.