Transformation of Public-Private Partnership in the post-New Public Management era: Britain and Spain compared
Abstract
The traditional models of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are in flux. The current debate in some countries in Western Europe is not about individual technical or methodological matters.
It is about a fundamental change of attitude and of the conception itself. It is about delivering an accelerated and cheaper procurement process with appropriate disciplines and incentives on the private sector to manage risk effectively, about empowering the public sector structures with proper capacities and skills to be a match for their private counterparts as well as about giving people control over the deals in which they (not just the government) are supposed to be an equal and fully-fledged party.
This article aims to examine and compare public sector structures involved in governance of PPPs in the UK and Spain and at the same time to assess the compatibility of the two national models' settings with the post-New Public Management framework shaped by the new paradigms/regimes. The spread and use of knowledge and skills capacities and the overall ability of the national institutional models to protect the public interest in an effective and efficient way is assessed together with openness and transparency of PPP programmes (progress in application of Public-Private-Citizen Collaboration (PC2) conception).
The scale and quality of use of the Web 2.0 tools able to reach and engage citizens in the policy implementation process and procurement of individual schemes play an important role here. Special attention is paid to ways in which the private sector entities on the one side and citizens on the other can approach the public authorities and influence the features of a particular partnership and its results.