Public-Private Partnerships in Urban Regeneration: Democratic Legitimacy and its Relation with Performance and Trust

Public-private entities set up specifically to manage and implement urban regeneration projects have been observed across several nations. In these urban regeneration partnerships, public and private partners often work together to improve languishing neighbourhoods. One of the core ideas driving the establishment of these partnerships is that, in order to more effectively tackle the challenging regeneration process, these organisations should function at arm's length from the political institutions that oversee them.A specific question concerning these partnerships is how representative mechanisms work and how the partnership process is linked to traditional representative bodies or in other ways is connected to principles of democratic legitimacy. This paper explores the so-called democratic legitimacy of urban regeneration companies, as a form of public-private partnership, in more detail. It makes a distinction between three types of democratic legitimacy: accountability, voice, and due deliberation. Using material from a survey among managers of urban regeneration companies (URCs) in The Netherlands, this paper examines the impact of these three forms of democratic legitimacy on outcomes and trust of these URCs.The results show a fairly strong correlation between some criteria of democratic legitimacy, especially due deliberation on the one hand and performance and trust on the other hand.

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