Reification and Praxis of Public–Private Partnerships in History

The existing literature on the concepts and history of Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs) locates its relevance for budgeting and development planning in developed countries as well as developing countries. Such literature often draws out the advantages and disadvantages of these concepts with a strong focus on the financial implications to the shareholders. However, there appears to be less emphasis on the effects of these concepts and gaps between theory and practice of PPPs. This chapter rejects essentialist and functional aspects of PPPs. It explores different dynamics of PPPs in theory and practice within global public policy. The purpose of this chapter is to reject the essentialist and neoliberal approach to PPPs by critically evaluating both normative and empirical arguments within existing literature on PPPs. The chapter draws its methodological lineages to nonlinear historical narrative around the concept and construction of the idea and language of ‘PPPs’. The chapter follows discourse analysis (Fairclough, Analysing discourse: textual analysis for social research. Routledge, 2003) to locate the way in which the PPPs were incorporated within the language of global public policies and their governance. The chapter finds that most of the existing literature is looking at managerial, operational, functional and essentialist aspects of PPPs. Therefore, the chapter argues that critical success of PPPs depends on its social value for common good with an emancipatory outlook. The study encourages future researchers to move beyond functional aspects of PPPs and locate emancipatory possibilities within the praxis of PPPs from a holistic perspective of global public policy.