Sustainability assessment of urban water public-private partnership projects with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria

With the acceleration of urbanization, the sustainability of urban water infrastructure projects has become pivotal to social development. This research aims to construct a comprehensive sustainability assessment model for urban water public-private partnership (PPP) projects based on the environmental, social, and governance criteria. First, a multi-level assessment indicator system is established considering the economic, social, ecological, and governance sustainability dimensions. Then, the extended analytic hierarchy process is utilized to determine the weights of indicators based on expert scoring. To address the ambiguity of qualitative linguistic variables, the interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy set method is applied to aggregate expert assessments. An empirical case study of an urban water project verifies the feasibility of the proposed approach. Results demonstrate that experts emphasize economic sustainability, while social sustainability is an overlooked dimension that requires improvement. The research contributes to the field by developing an applied, industry-specific sustainability evaluation model for urban water PPP projects using advanced decision-making techniques. This model provides practical tools for stakeholders to enhance the sustainable performance of urban water infrastructure projects.