Private-Public Partnerships

In the global era, the design and delivery of public policy and public services has become increasingly complex, pluralist, and fragmented. In light of multifaceted challenges that cut across policy and service areas and cannot be addressed solely through the work of individual organizations, the notion of public-private partnerships (PPPs) has gained widespread prominence. These have been championed as offering governments a more sophisticated opportunity to achieve public goals through private means than traditional privatization mechanisms have offered.

Although some critics have argued that PPPs account for little more than a “language game” that replaces negatively tainted ideas like “contracting out” or “privatization” with a positive metaphor that heralds inclusiveness, moral value, and superiority, PPPs are nonetheless widely believed to be a practical answer to the interdependent and complex social systems that deliver public services. They are considered to offer:

• enhanced efficiency and effectiveness through producing public services faster, at lower costs, by alternative financing arrangements, and with rational divisions of labor; better distribution and management of risk;
• improved accountability and monitoring for public services delivery;
• integrated, multi-actor approaches to tackling diffuse problems;
• an image enhancement for the public services by emphasizing their collaboration with the private sector;
• access to new markets and areas for private- and third-sector organizations; and
• improved problem-solving capacity for social and economic issues and a route to enhanced democratic participation.

Despite such assumption that PPPs make possible resources savings and enhance public service delivery, though, the true nature of their economic, financial, and quality benefits remains unclear and is subject to extensive, often ideologically, tainted debates. There are two problems here. First, it is often hard to evaluate the actual impact of PPPs on public resource allocation because the term itself in fact acts as an umbrella term for a multiplicity of service delivery arrangements, with little definitional consensus. Its meaning can differ within and between projects, sectors, and countries and can comprise organizational sharing of risk and production, narrowly defined long-term contracts, policy networks, substantial capital development projects, civil society and community development links, and urban renewal and economic development programs. It can even be used simply as a generic term for relationships between multiple parties involved in the delivery of public services. A second problem relates to the actual assessment process in relation to the achievements of PPPs. Not only is this process itself subject to technical and psychosocial problems, but frequently the aims of PPPs are expressed in such vague terms as to render it difficult, if not impossible, to reach a firm assessment of their achievements.

Given such ambivalence about the nature of PPPs, it is unsurprising that practical guidance about how to design and manage them effectively is limited. However, research evidence about the key characteristics associated with successful collaborative partnerships has been accumulated. These focus on the different stages through which partnerships proceed and the managerial challenges that these stages present to the partners. They generally divide collaboration into five iterative phases: precontact, preliminary contact, negotiations, implementation, and evaluation. Although stages are not necessarily sequential and may overlap, they are interdependent. Each stage has to be negotiated successfully for a collaboration to be successful: Failure at any stage is likely to both end a specific collaboration and to undermine the success of any future collaborative attempts. For these stages to be navigated successfully, a range of contingent factors have been identified in the literature. Inter alia, these include the

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