Adapting governance of Public-Private Partnerships to the post-New Public Management framework: challanges to British, Czech and Spanish approaches
Abstract
This paper aims to examine and compare public sector structures involved in governance of PPPs in the Czech Republic, Spain and the UK and at the same time to assess the compatibility of the three national models’ settings with the post-New Public Management framework shaped by the new paradigms. 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.
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.
A series of personal semi-structured and open-ended interviews with the representatives of different levels of the governance structures were carried out to map the systems, their nature and quality and extent of their internal and external interactions. In the next step, designs of the three national networks are compared to demonstrate striking differences in public sector structures’ integrity and capabilities that, it is argued, have a direct impact on their overall performance.
On the whole, several obstacles to full compatibility with an elaborate public governance structures were identified in the three national approaches. Further research is needed to explore examples of the best practices within the models and ways of combining them to achieve better steered and more democratically accountable PPP programmes.