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For those of us who were born in the 1970s and the 1980s, a geographic Europe without a European Economic Area is inconceivable. Our generation has been studying the acquis communautaire together with the constitutional law of the Member State where they attended university. Those who were born in the 1990s, who are entering the legal profession now, have received their pocket money and their first pay cheque in euros. Yet, the Brexit referendum in 2016 has shaken our common beliefs. Is the European Union (EU) a project European citizens need? Is it possible to maintain political stability, peace and prosperity without it? Brexit seemed to represent, at the time, the potential follow-up to Grexit and the forerunner to Italexit. After three years of self-destructive actions by the British government, the firm and united reaction of the rest of Europe has shown the world that the EU is here to stay. Until Brexit, the UK and the English practitioners were at the forefront in interpreting and making the EU financial regulations familiar to market participants. They were the point of reference. Today we still read the EU policies and laws on financial services through the lenses of English law and practice. Yet Brexit has started a process that will likely change the status quo. Brexit pushed and will push more and more practitioners in a post-Brexit EU to challenge themselves, and to find new paradigms.

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.