Public private partnerships: an introduction

TLDR

Public‑private partnerships, an extension of the new public management agenda, involve collaboration between public and private sector organisations to deliver services, yet many questions about their regulation, pre‑decision analysis, and post‑project evaluation remain unanswered. The issue aims to explore the global spread of PPPs, particularly the UK’s Private Finance Initiative, and to outline the seven papers comprising the special issue. The introduction outlines the special issue’s structure, dividing the seven papers into four on PFI aspects and three country‑based studies of PFI/PPP from the USA, New Zealand and Australia.

Abstract

Public private partnerships (PPPs) are a recent extension of what has now become well known as the “new public management” agenda for changes in the way public services are provided. PPPs involve organisations whose affiliations lie in respectively the public and private sectors working together in partnership to provide public services. This special issue of the Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal explores this new development, which, in its most advanced form, is contained in the UK’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI) but is now spreading across the world in multiple forms. This introduction provides an overview of this development as well as an outline of the seven papers that make up this special issue. These seven papers are divided into two parts – the first four looking at different aspects of PFI and the latter three providing three country‐based (from the USA, New Zealand and Australia) studies of PFI/PPP. Many questions about the nature, regulation, pre‐decision analysis and post‐project evaluation are addressed in these papers but many research questions remain unanswered, as this Introduction makes plain.