'Public', 'private' and 'partnership': making sense of the persistence of infrastructure public-private partnerships in international development

Masanzu, Shingira (2024) 'Public', 'private' and 'partnership': making sense of the persistence of infrastructure public-private partnerships in international development. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

What explains the persistent commitment, within development thinking, to public-private partnerships (PPPs) as a strategy for infrastructure investment in developing countries, given the challenges in implementing the model and the criticisms levied against it? What risks being overlooked amid the sense of urgency, inevitability and necessity that characterises PPP discourse? These two questions lie at the heart of this research project. The study’s point of departure is that PPP strategies and deal-making are merely the endpoint of a much richer and complex set of assumptions and decisions. Proceeding from this, and with a view to making sense of how infrastructure PPPs have emerged, assumed a place of dominance and persisted within the mainstream development imagination, the project develops insights about PPP discourse from three angles: historical, professional and legal. The project draws two main conclusions from these insights. The first is that the dominance and persistence of infrastructure PPPs in the development imagination can in part be explained by the powerful combination of the deeply rooted historical trajectory of PPPs and the path dependence reflected in the way that ideas about PPPs are reproduced by professional networks of experts and stakeholders working on infrastructure, despite their misgivings. This in turn is bolstered by the deep-seated sense among development strategists and practitioners that there is no real alternative to a recourse to the private sector. Against this backdrop, PPPs seem necessary, inevitable, and even natural as an answer to infrastructure challenges in developing countries. The second conclusion is that the type of legal reasoning employed in PPP discourse helps to powerfully entrench it by depoliticising it and elevating it to the ostensibly ideologically disinterested realm of technical and objective policy-making. The legal reasoning that underpins PPP models crucially relies on the choosing of legal principles that foreground the private and background the public. While these choices are often presented as neutral and universally beneficial, in practical terms, they entail material, normative and distributional implications that both further embed mainstream PPP discourse and contribute to altering understandings of the state, public decision-making processes and the very ‘public-ness’ of infrastructure, while resetting the bounds of what is considered legitimate government conduct.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Shingira Masanzu
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) K Law > K Law (General)
Sets:	Departments > Law
Supervisor:	Salomon, Margot E. and Kleinheisterkamp, Jan
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4796

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