As you might guess, I didn’t originally write this post for this blog. But no one else wants it, so I’ll publish the poor orphaned post myself.
The term public-private partnerships don’t get explained much. They partnerships a lot of attention, but it’s such common vocabulary that no one ever stops to explain it. That’s okay, though, because it’s a useless term.
A public-private partnership is any collaboration between public bodies – like a government, the UN, or an NGO – and a business entity. That’s all. Public organization working with a private one. A pharmaceutical company donating drugs to UNICEF or a developing country government. A consulting firm offering free services to the Global Fund. A local government providing start-up capital to a business that may serve a public good.
Personally, I think this piece of jargon has pretty much outlived its usefulness. It doesn’t describe an unusual situation, help corporations understand their role, or serve as an accurate or specific term. We should retire it.
Ten years ago, when private sector business rarely got involved in development, we needed special vocabulary to encourage them. “Public-private partnership” sounds reassuring. “You’re not in this alone, frightened little corporation! You’re in a partnership. The UN will help you, we promise!” The special term helped to normalize business participating in international development efforts.
Now, though, it’s pretty much become the norm. Businesses get involved in international development and global health all the time. They don’t need supportive language to help them understand that they belong. They have decided it’s in their interest to support global health, and that’s pretty much enough to motivate a profit-making entity.
Because it’s the norm, we also don’t need special exclusive language that sets apart business-funded development work from work funded by government or private donors. Those are not the traditional donors any more; people expect that there will be corporate involvement in global health, for example. So we don’t need to single out public-private partnerships as a special case. They’re just one of the many ways that we fund international development work.
It’s also a term that is so general it’s useless. For all that it was supposed to helpfully describe a special kind of health or development effort, instead it’s meaningless. I mean, what if the US government hires an international development company like Casals Associates to implement a development effort? Why isn’t that a public-private partnership? If Oxfam buys plane tickets for its employees, why is that not a public-private partnership?
The horse has left the barn. The bird has flown the coop, and you can never get those square foam pieces to fit back into the box once you’ve opened it. The corporation has entered the hen house, and it’s pretty much okay with the hens. Public-private partnerships vary, to a huge degree. It’s not useful to try to lump them all together, any more than it is to assume all official development assistance is the same. This new world of business participation in global health needs a new vocabulary to describe it.
I thought it was going to be about that other PPP – purchasing power parity! Thanks for the thought provoking post on a rainy Saturday evening.
Nice article, however, it is not because PPP is generally accepted now, that it is always a good thing.
A more diverse vocabulary, ranging from just plain “corruption”over “green-washing” to “social responsibility” and “risking the bottom line for a pet project of management” might be better indicated. It should also be clear that what Bill Gates does is not PPP in the sense of a company collaborating. It is Philanthropy by a praiseworthy individual.
You’ve said exactly what I’ve been trying to find the words to say for several years now, but somehow couldn’t. I completely agree.
@Sam Gardener: I’m not aware of anyone in the industry who would consider Bill Gates an example of PPP, since the vast majority (all?) of what Bill Gates does in terms of international development assistance comes through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – a charitable foundation set up specifically for the purpose of… being charitiable.
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I’m not sure that you’ve defined “PPP” correctly. Your definition is so broad that it is—you are right—unhelpful. But a true PPP is one in which a private company provides the capital for a public service (typically: school construction, highways, water systems) that would normally be built by the government. In return, they get to own and operate the infrastructure, to generate an income, for a number of years. The advantage to the government is that it doesn’t have to use its sometimes scarce capital. The advantage to the private sector is that the PPP can be fairly safe investment, though in recent years certain road projects in Australia have failed to perform financially. See: http://yv2.me/lYou
A PPP requires that the private party “assumes substantial financial, technical and operational risk in the project.” NONE of these examples that you mentioned are PPPs:
• A pharmaceutical company donating drugs
• A consulting firm offering free services
• A local government providing start-up capital to a business
They would be more properly characterised as CSR, or corporate charity, in the first two cases, and government subsidy, in the third.
Nor can I ever see a large private sector entity taking any comfort in being handheld by the UN. 🙂
Well…
Possibly that is the ‘correct’ definition of a PPP. But we both know that this is not how it is being used in reality, whether in development or here in our back yards: I guess I don’t have to remind you that e.g. the Wonthaggi desalination plant is officially a PPP, but has the Victorian state government bear almost all the risks and costs. And no, capital was really not scarce at the time the plans were laid.