Public Private Partnerships: deciphering meaning message and phenomenon

Abstract

There is no doubt that Public private partnerships have been a dominant issue in governmental rhetoric’s but also in governmental practice. In many countries governments have turned to the idea of public private partnerships, or partnerships in general, as a vehicle to realize better policy outcomes, or to enhance investments in fields like infrastructure health or even social policy. However at the same time the concept and the idea of PPP has been a contested concept (see Hodge and Greve, 2005, Weihe, 2008). Even is we roughly define Public private partnership (PPP) as a “more or less sustainable cooperation between public and private actors in which joint products and/or services are developed and in which risks, costs and profits are shared” (Klijn and Teisman, 2003) we can still find many different forms under this heading. So PPP’s have been given many meanings, been used it quite a number of ways and we see many different manifestations. Now this is all very normal for many ideas and terms used both in the world of practice and in the world of science but in this case the confusion seems to even bigger than usual. In general we can find confusion on at least three areas, which of course are also connected to each other: - Confusion about the meaning of public private partnerships; not only do we find many different definitions but also many different appraisals and emotions. - Confusion about the argumentations and rationality of public private partnerships; there is a lot of discussion what precisely PPP’s should or could achieve (better value for money, more investments, innovations etc.) and these argumentations not seldom seems to be contradictory; - Confusion about what preferable or best form public private partnerships should have; both in the scientific literature and in the many policy documents that want to promote PPP we can find a wide variety of forms that are being seen as the best or the most workable form to cast the cooperation in. In this chapter we will elaborate on each of these confusions.