Private Capital Needs a Rulebook Before Projects Can Scale

Core Argument

This week Cabinet approved publishing the draft Public-Private Partnership Bill in the Government Gazette, the step before it goes to Parliament. The Bill sets one legal route for a PPP project from selection to closure and puts a National Agency for PPP on statutory footing. The structural weakness is institutional. Sri Lanka created a PPP unit in 2017, converted it into the National Agency for Public-Private Partnerships, wound it up in 2020 and re-established it in 2022. A body that one decision can close and another can reopen cannot hold contracts that run for decades. Officials also promised the law for the first quarter and then the third quarter of 2026, and the President now points to February 2027 for Parliament. Chasing approvals one project at a time does not fix this. Roughly 67 projects are in development, and without a common standard each one measures risk differently, including contingent liabilities. The October wind-up of the Colombo logistics hub venture, with about 80 per cent of US$37.14 million in capital returned (derived), shows that investors exit quietly when timelines slip. Businesses should treat the Bill as a build specification: map appraisal and procurement requirements to internal processes, build repeatable bid capacity, price contingent exposure, form consortia before tenders, and deal fairly with suppliers. The Philippines, which wrote its PPP centre into statute through the 2023 PPP Code, shows the mechanism: rules fixed in law before the bid is written. The firms that scale on this framework will be the ones that built for it before it became law.