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RA 11966 — the Public-Private Partnership Code of the Philippines — was signed into law by President Marcos on 5 December 2023 and took effect on 23 December 2023. Section 89 of the Code mandated the PPP Governing Board (acting as PPP Code IRR Committee) to promulgate the IRR within 90 days of effectivity. The IRR was ceremonially signed on 21 March 2024, published in a newspaper of general circulation on 22 March 2024, and became effective fifteen days after publication — on 6 April 2024.
The PPP Code replaces two pre-existing legal regimes:
1. The 1990 Build-Operate-Transfer Law (RA 6957) as amended by RA 7718 (1994) — the original BOT framework that constrained PPPs to specific contractual variants (BOT, BOO, BLT, BTO, etc.) and applied primarily to national-government and GOCC infrastructure. 2. The NEDA and GCG Joint Venture Guidelines — separate, sometimes conflicting, agency-issued rules that governed joint ventures between GOCCs and private partners.
Going forward, the Code is the single unified framework for all PPPs across the national government, GOCCs, state universities and colleges, and local government units. Coverage is also broadened beyond classic "hard" economic infrastructure to expressly include social infrastructure (hospitals, schools, housing) and information-technology infrastructure.
Under the BOT Law, the rate of return on unsolicited proposals was capped by NEDA Board–set ceilings; the Code instead requires only that the return be "reasonable", as determined on a project-specific basis — materially raising the upside available to original proponents and intended to revive a moribund unsolicited pipeline.
recognises GOCC–private joint ventures as a PPP modality under the unified regime, replacing the parallel GCG/NEDA JV Guidelines track.
(under NEDA, now under the Department of Economy, Planning, and Development following the 2025 NEDA restructuring) is the central technical-coordination and contract-management body for all PPPs across implementing agencies.
deadlines for each phase of project review — intended to compress the end-to-end approval cycle that under the BOT Law typically ran 3–5 years for major national projects.
eligible PPP project categories, alongside the traditional transport, water, power, and waste infrastructure of the BOT era.
Department of Finance review of government-undertakings (sovereign guarantees, performance undertakings, minimum-revenue guarantees) and links them to the PHP 30bn (≈ USD 540m) Contingent Liabilities Fund appropriated annually under the General Appropriations Act.
investment-regime change shaping the Marcos administration's PHP 9 trillion (≈ USD 160bn) flagship infrastructure programme. Together with RA 11954 (Maharlika Investment Fund, which provides equity capital) and RA 12066 (CREATE MORE, which provides fiscal incentives), it forms the third leg of the post-2023 investment-regime overhaul targeting foreign infrastructure capital.
60-40 nationality cap on ownership of public utilities (which was partially relaxed by the 2022 Public Service Act amendments reclassifying telecoms, transport, expressways, airports, and railways as non-public-utility services), but harmonises the bidder-qualification rules across all implementing agencies — reducing friction for Japanese, Korean, Singaporean, and European infrastructure consortia that historically navigated agency-specific rules.
partners (Metro Pacific Investments, San Miguel, Aboitiz InfraCapital, Ayala Corp, JG Summit, Megawide) remain the primary domestic vehicles for foreign infrastructure capital under the unified regime — the reforms strengthen the legal certainty around their unsolicited and joint-venture pipelines.
rate-of-return cap is removed — early test cases will set market expectations.
appetite for infrastructure (first major MIF deployment was the Jan 2025 NGCP grid stake — a non-PPP transaction, but the MIF mandate permits PPP co-investment).
most LGUs previously operated under separate NEDA-DILG JV Guidelines with limited PPP-Center technical-assistance penetration.