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Much attention has gone towards ‘up-front’ processes when delivering infrastructure public–private partnerships (PPPs), but less on how to best govern after the ribbon is cut and the infrastructure built. This chapter identifies the primary contractual and institutional governance challenges arising in the medium to long term of PPP concession contracts and explores these governance challenges through interviews with high-level PPP industry insiders. The chapter presents new findings from Australia on the importance of good public administration for successful PPP operation, and on the interesting evolution of medium- to long-term governance arrangements. It finds that although industry interviewees agreed PPP governance had improved significantly, they had differing views on how capable Australian states were and how well this task was being undertaken. The up-front contract was judged as dominating long-term governance arrangements, with the biggest ongoing challenge for PPPs seen as the need greater transparency in order to improve PPP legitimacy in the eyes of citizens. The professionals themselves were indeed split on the current adequacy of PPP transparency. No single institutional model for governing long term contracts was found, indicating a wide variety of feasible options for policy makers.

Public-private partnership (PPP) is now a staple in public policy making and a well-known institution for designing, financing, building, operating and maintaining large infrastructure projects internationally. In this book we have focused on a number of recent issues and debates that have surrounded the theme of PPP. This concluding chapter reviews the main arguments of the book before proceeding to discuss and synthesize some of the most prevalent issues affecting public-private partnerships (PPPs) today. These issues include the timing of the economic rationale compared to the political need for PPPs, and the question of whether PPPs have come full circle. Finally, we look at the future of PPP and note its evolution from a focus on the effective delivery of individual projects to (inter)national infrastructure plans competing with each other for political and economic dominance.

This chapter reviews the research pedigree on public–private partnerships (PPPs) from Broadbent and Laughlin’s seminal piece in 1999. The PPP phenomenon is viewed at five levels: project delivery, organizational form, policy, governance tool and as a phenomenon within a broader historical and cultural context. It is argued in this chapter that whilst a variety of research issues will continue to be relevant, five corresponding areas deserve future visibility for a renewed research agenda: (1) financialization of PPPs, (2) global PPP market actors, (3) internationalization of policy on PPPs, (4) long-term complex contracts as a governing regime and (5) PPPs in BRIC and developing countries. We have moved from a focus on PPP purely as projects to a focus on PPP as a phenomenon. We have also moved from a national to a more comparative studies focus; from attention on the formal and the technical, to more socio-political and informal concerns; from a few disciplinary lenses to many; and from regarding PPP as ‘the next big thing’ to seeing it as a series of ongoing experiments. PPP is now a highly internationalized and longer-term collaborative ideal. The merit and worth of PPP nonetheless remains a fundamental recurring theme within the relationship between governments and business.

In this chapter we first put forward some of the key economic arguments for PPPs. Rather than being a systematic treatment of the economics literature, we base much of it on the work of colleagues or finance academics we have met or have read. We highlight some of the scholarly economic arguments favouring PPPs and articulate crucial dimensions contained in these arguments. In particular, we highlight the opposing views of scholars where these exist, and point to any big gaps between what is argued at a theoretical level and what appears to be known at an empirical level. What we find is that economists generally tend to agree on the potential for PPPs to provide efficiencies compared to the public sector alternative. Less agreement, and indeed, strong disagreement exists, however, between economists on the conceptual manner through which rigorous evaluation of PPPs ought to be undertaken. These disagreements, along with a paucity of empirical data supporting PPP superiority, leave a surprisingly wide gap in our knowledge. So, in common with the privatizations undertaken by Thatcher during the 1980s_1990s, there remain huge differences between what is theorized on the one hand about aspects of PPP performance and what is proved empirically on the other.