Public-Private Partnerships Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Public-private partnerships are commonly cited by governments, business, the press and academics as constructive, and even “cure-all,” mechanisms for development in many spheres. Public-private partnerships have risen to the forefront of development processes as the global shift toward governance has gathered momentum. As stakeholders in development have come to recognize that they are interdependent and as the search for new solutions to contemporary problems has expanded beyond the use of traditional mechanisms of government, public-private partnerships have become increasingly popular in both the developed and developing world.

Although varying definitions abound, public-private partnerships are collaborations across the public and private sectors that are seen by the respective parties as facilitating greater gains than could be achieved by working separately or in conflict. They are further considered as a tool or instrument of development, enabling governments to carry out their role in a context of governance, which increasingly requires a role for many players in decision making, development, and service delivery.

Public-private partnerships can form through various motivations, such as access to capital or expertise, lack of capacity to deliver services effectively, the possibility of cost savings in a competitive service delivery environment, or as responses to shifts in government policy. These partnerships should be understood as reflections of the institutional culture and local context through which they emerge. The purpose of a partnership can be to achieve a onetime goal, perhaps a particular economic development, or they can be established to effect ongoing broader development goals, such as urban renewal, shared service delivery, or the improvement of urban economic competitiveness. Where ongoing change is the goal, these networks can form strong and lasting alliances, such as those of growth coalitions and urban regimes.

Typically, public-private partnerships have been used to assist a state’s infrastructure delivery programs. These partnerships are especially needed to help governments to overcome backlogs in delivery of services and infrastructure such as water and electricity provision or where local governments outsource service delivery to the private sector in an attempt to ensure greater cost effectiveness or efficiency. Furthermore, public-private partnerships for tourism are increasingly advocated as a means of local economic development, especially where state conservation areas are released for use by the commercial sector or for use as a commercial entity. In countries such as South Africa, recent focus on public-private partnerships has extended to health care provision with public and private-sector health services working in shared locations and with the private sector under contract to run government health facilities.

Regardless of the specific details of the partnership, all partnerships are formed with a view to enabling partners to share both the risks and the rewards of their collective venture and usually entail a specified and formal agreement between parties, denoting the nature of all roles and responsibilities and the nature of shared costs, risks, and benefits. Some important measures of a successful partnership are appropriate and sound leadership, good communication within the partnership and with other stakeholders (perhaps those affected by the activities of the partnership), well-defined roles within the partnership, meeting of partnership goals and shared benefits of the partnership outcomes.

Although public-private partnerships are widely lauded mechanisms for both service delivery and development, questions remain about the power relations within partnerships and the overall impact of the specific outcomes of partnership activities.

The configuration of these partnership networks creates variability in how partners exercise power and determines whether decision-making processes are led by the public or private sectors, although it is commonly held that the public partner will usually carry the greater set of costs and risks within a partnership.

It is also worth questioning whether private-sector involvement in service delivery and development may result in the sidelining of issues such as accountability to the public, social equity, and justice. This is true in property development partnerships, in the course of which the local community may be sidelined as private-sector goals become central and as the state’s role simultaneously becomes that of developer and regulator, or in service delivery partnerships where the rights of the poor to water and electricity may be compromised by the marketdriven systems of the private sector. Furthermore there are sometimes concerns that the private sector may use a partnership to exercise undue leverage over the allocation of public funds, especially into projects for their own gain.

Bibliography:

Alan Harding, Stuart Wilks-Heeg, and Mary Hutchins, “Business, Government and the Business of Urban Governance,” Urban Studies (v.37, 2000);
Stephen P. Mullin, “Public-Private Partnerships and State and Local Economic Development: Leveraging Private Investment,” Reviews of Economic Development Literature and Practice (16, 2002);
Gerry Stoker, “Public Private Partnerships in Urban Governance,” in Pierre, ed., Partnerships in Urban Governance: European and American Experience (St. Martin’s Press, 1998).