MANDEL INSTITUTE - Public-Private Partnerships

"Public Private Partnerships in order to Provide Public Services: Opportunity or Illusion?”

For three decades, the procurement of public services (like water supply, public transportation, waste disposal, and beyond, education, research and health, etc.) has been engaged in a process of intensive changes, both in developed and less-developed countries. Both at the local and national levels, public authorities have been willing to introduce new regulatory regimes and to modify the procurement procedures in order to allow private sector participation and improve performances. Public private partnerships have often been viewed as a perfect organizational solution in order to provide public services and relax (local) public authorities’ financial constraints. Thinking about those issues is high on the agenda of practitioners and policy-makers. At the same time, it has also generated a new stream of both theoretical and empirical research, which redefines our understanding of the limits between the public and the private spheres. The objective of this course is to provide a short introduction to what we can learn from recent empirical studies and theoretical developments related to the design of efficient governances for public services. More precisely we will talk about issues such as: - the limits of Public-Private Partnerships; - the contractual design of public-private agreements; - the impact of the institutional framework on governance design - the respective merits of delegation and PFI - the practicability and efficiency of alternative awarding mechanisms (namely auction and negotiation).