78% now see risk-sharing as key to allocation, but contracts alone won't deliver it

For years, the default answer to transport infrastructure risk was to price it, insure it and hand it to someone else. That answer is losing ground. In the Transport Infrastructure Outlook 2027 , financial risk-sharing incentives and advanced risk analysis tools now top the list of methods respondents consider key to effective risk allocation. They were cited by 78% and 77% respectively, up from 49% and 53% a year ago, when comprehensive insurance led the field.

Insurance hasn't been abandoned. Every method except ESG was cited more often this year, so insurance was overtaken rather than dropped. The more useful question for procurement leaders is whether practice has moved as fast as sentiment.

From transferring risk to sharing it

In major transport procurement, financial risk-sharing usually means alliances and early contractor involvement (ECI) models. In these models, contractor margin is tied to project performance rather than fixed up front. Pain-share/gain-share provisions are the most common form: client and contractor both absorb the cost of getting it wrong and both share the benefit of getting it right.

Part of the momentum comes from the fallout of fixed-price contracting. Marc Allen, Executive Advisor at RP Infrastructure, puts it plainly: "Following the pandemic, inflation and supply chain disruption placed considerable pressure on contractors delivering fixed-price contracts. This has contributed to a shift towards more collaborative models, including alliances, Incentivised Target Cost contracts and other approaches that allow risk to be allocated to the parties best placed to manage it."

Luke Whistler, Executive Director of Delta Infrastructure Advisory and Deputy Chair of the Infrastructure Association of Queensland, sees the incentive working as intended: "I'm seeing a lot of good models emerging, particularly gain/pain share mechanisms that split savings between client and contractor, so the contractor is genuinely motivated to bring forward innovations rather than being unsure of developing them."

A contract doesn't make a culture

The enthusiasm for risk-sharing sits awkwardly next to how respondents rate their actual outcomes. Asked how effectively risk was allocated on their most recent project, 54% of EMEA respondents said "very effectively", more than double the 26% a year ago. The figures were 36% in Asia-Pacific and 30% in the Americas, with 50 respondents per region.

The report attributes Europe's lead partly to its longer, larger-scale experience with availability-based PPPs and regulated concessions. The European Investment Bank alone has financed hundreds of transport concessions across member states. Precedent, in other words, does a lot of the work.

Naming risk-sharing as key is not the same as making it work. Allen is clear on that: "Collaborative models can support better risk sharing, but their success depends on how they are established and governed… for them to work, they need to be supported by collaborative behaviours and an embedded culture to collaborate." He adds: "No contracting model removes the potential for disagreement."

Whistler makes the same point: "The model still requires people willing to have honest conversations and trust each other enough to reach for a resolution before an issue escalates into a dispute."

Why government wants the numbers

When respondents had to pick a single most important method, advanced risk analysis tools came first at 25%, with financial risk-sharing incentives at 21%. Government agencies show the strongest preference: 33% of the 51 agencies surveyed rank risk analysis tools as their single most important risk allocation lever.

The report links this to the scrutiny public bodies face, including audit, parliamentary questions and Freedom of Information requests. Quantitative risk modelling, cost and schedule simulations and AI analytics give agencies a documented, quantified basis for each allocation decision, which they can defend years after financial close.

Whistler describes what's at stake: "During an audit, if you can't reconstruct who said what, who saw what, when decisions were made and on what basis, you may find a troublesome scenario unfolding."

Better analysis also starts well before the software. "There's a trend now to actively manage risks that are real, rather than bundling up unknowns and handing them to whoever seems best placed to carry them, often the party least equipped to do so," says Whistler. He cites a client that spent considerable time and money investigating ground conditions along an alignment before going to market. The client also built a contractual mechanism for genuine unknowns, and that mechanism was never triggered.

Peter Jones, Managing Director of MBB Group, sees the same discipline across the market: "the level of field investigation we do now is 10 times what we did 10 years ago, and that goes directly to efficiency, it reduces unknown risks and gives the market something it can actually price with confidence."

A risk model is only as defensible as the record around it. Purpose-built platforms such as Ansarada Procure hold that record in one controlled environment, with role-based access and a complete audit trail. Without one, the evidence ends up scattered across email and shared drives.

Better analysis still needs braver decisions

Even the best data leaves a judgement call. "Lessons are being learnt, slowly, but the bigger challenge is confidence in decisions: the ability to make clear decisions on the limited information available at a point in time and then having the executive backing behind those challenging decision points," says Whistler.

Jones argues that the most promising models go further and question the brief itself: "What delivery partner and ECI models do is challenge the requirement itself." He is candid about the demand this places on clients: "That requires a level of maturity in procuring agencies that is a step up from where things have been."

Audrey Bailly, Business Development Director at Ansarada, sees that maturity building: "Today, procurement is increasingly recognised as a strategic function that directly impacts project delivery, risk management and stakeholder confidence."

There's still reason for caution. The report itself warns that infrastructure procurement is prone to optimism bias, with perceptions of performance often outpacing measurable outcomes. A jump from 49% to 78% in a year measures what people believe works. The evidence will come from projects delivered on time and on budget.

Takeaways for procurement leaders

Treat risk-sharing as an operating model, not a clause. Pain-share/gain-share only aligns incentives if governance, KPIs and day-to-day behaviour support it. Set those up before award, not after the first dispute.

Investigate before you allocate. Unknowns passed to the party least able to carry them come back as claims. Early site investigation and early engagement with utilities and asset owners give bidders something they can price.

Build the decision record as you go. For public agencies especially, a risk decision is only as strong as your ability to show how it was reached, by whom and on what evidence.

Measure outcomes, not sentiment. Only 30% of Americas respondents and 36% in Asia-Pacific say risk was allocated very effectively on their last project. Benchmark against delivered results rather than last year's survey answers.

The full data on risk allocation methods, regional effectiveness and contributor interviews is in the Transport Infrastructure Outlook 2027 .

Shared risk depends on shared visibility. Ansarada Procure gives procurement teams one secure environment to run bidder Q&A, control access to sensitive documents and keep a complete, probity-ready audit trail of every decision. Book a demo to see how it supports defensible risk allocation from tender to financial close.