New Infrastructures, Financing Needs and Public Acceptance: Towards New Public-Private Models

As part of Paris Infraweek, Bredin Prat organized a conference focused on New Infrastructures, Financing Needs and Public Acceptance: Towards New Public-Private Models.

Our country’s economic and social development makes it necessary to meet an ever-growing need for infrastructure in the areas of transportation, energy, and digital technology. It is also essential to adapt existing infrastructure to the effects of global warming. This dual requirement to build new infrastructure and adapt existing infrastructure places public initiative back at the heart of infrastructure projects, as public entities are responsible for initiating these projects and fostering a long-term vision for their regions.

This reality comes against a backdrop of increasingly limited public budgetary resources, which calls for mobilizing additional funding and devising new levers and modes of action.

To meet these challenges, it is necessary to adopt a long-term vision, combine public and private financing, mobilize essential resources such as strategic land, and ensure broad acceptance of projects in particular by ensuring that the benefits of these projects are fairly shared with the regions and citizens.

The purpose of this roundtable was to bring together elected officials, institutional stakeholders, and investors in a comprehensive discussion on modernizing the contractual model for infrastructure and public-private partnerships.

It is necessary to move beyond or even invent new partnership models capable of balancing the goals of economic development, budgetary constraints, the need for local acceptance, and a fair return to the regions.