Abstract: Stepping into the new century, China has a number of major water conservancy projects built or under construction. Most of them feature with public welfare or quasi-operation, and adopt the PPP financing pattern and a governance framework of "government leading + market mechanism". This paper chooses three representative major water conservancy projects using the PPP pattern already built or under construction, and examines their top-level governance structure. We find that the pattern can be aimed at a single construction of the project, not necessarily at the whole project. And the responsibility for project implementation can be taken by the project entity established by the government, not necessarily by the financing enterprises. Case analysis indicates that various ways can be found to apply the PPP model or establish the project entity, but both applications are not independent from each other. Hence, it is necessary to combine both and then select a satisfactory project top-level governance structure. In this work, a method for designing feasible schemes is developed and optimal schemes determined using an entropy weight-VIKOR method, on the basis of analysis of the top-level structure as demonstrated above.

Key words: major water conservancy project, PPP model, project top-level governance, entropy weight-VIKOR method