Managing Public Values in Public-Private Partnerships: Do Public Authorities Succeed?

Using the polity instrument of public-private partnerships (PPPs), governments achieve their policy goals by delegating the responsibility for the delivery of public infrastructure and service provision to private consortia. PPPs, as hybrid institutions, embody principal-agent challenges in the implementation of public policies given that private agents may have different goals than bureaucracies. Governments need to find ways of managing consortia so that they implement policy goals despite inherent information asymmetry and in the presence of different (conflictual) institutional logics: state versus market. Governments might not always succeed in overcoming these conflicts and their failure to achieve avowed policy goals may harm public values such as accountability, transparency, responsibility, responsiveness, and quality. In order to empirically determine to what extent governments succeed in safeguarding public values in PPPs, a multiple case study involving seven DBFMO projects in Spain and the Netherlands has been employed. The analysis demonstrates that governments exercise control over the operations of the private consortia and, overall, can account for their results and are able to impose a state "logic". However, this does not happen at the outset, and not all public values are preserved simultaneously.