The right to know and obligation to provide: public private partnerships, public knowledge, public accountability, public disenfranchisement and prison cases

The prison privatisation cases are used to illustrate the proposition that the public can be disenfranchised and public knowledge can be endangered, under market-based public reforms such as public private partnerships (PPPs), thus revealing that paucity of public knowledge is a threat to good governance and public accountability. It is found that the social contract is undermined by the lack of transparency in PPP projects with commercial confidentiality clauses used excessively to prevent citizen access to public information.