Public-private partnerships: promises, productivity and performance lessons from infrastructure technologies

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) matter. Today, the PPP chatter is everywhere, from international organisations such as the World Bank and OECD to the central policy platforms of many countries around the globe. Governments, commercial companies and not-for-profit organisations all seem to be interested in them, because they promise benefits across diverse sectors at a time when governments are being reminded that they cannot hope to tackle contemporary social, environmental and economic problems alone. In some ways, none of this is surprising because we have long sought the best of the public, private and social sectors in solving public policy problems. So a continued path of experimentation in how to best combine the work of these three sectors is inevitable.