Network risk may be mitigated by a thorough investigation of network dependencies and identification of those dependencies that are critical to the project. This should narrow the potential scope of government undertakings and heighten both parties' awareness of network issues and the critical status of particular features of the network.
The following are additional network risk mitigation factors that should be considered in individual projects:
• use of 'network discriminatory' clauses under which government undertakes to provide appropriate redress to the private party where government acts in certain specified ways which discriminate against the project;
• a material adverse effect regime, used to allocate part of the network risk to government; and
• from government's perspective, clear and specific identification of which network risks it will assume.
Network risk taken by the private party is also mitigated in practice if (for example, in a water treatment project) government is the intermediate purchaser of the service and has a vested interest in effective service delivery (provided, of course, there are no competing government interests).