Equalities in Public Private Partnerships (EQUIPPPS)

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This proposal seeks funding for a Strategic Network to identify research gaps and formulate a research agenda on Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) in developing countries across four sectors: education, health, housing and water. PPPs increasingly play a significant role in the financing and delivery of public services. They are deemed to offer potential for addressing inequalities in provision and access to public services across the Global South. As such, they are promoted as an important development financing mechanism in support of the Sustainable Development Goals (see SDG 17.3 and the Addis Ababa Declaration of the Third United Nations Financing for Development Summit, July 2015). The occurrence of PPPs, however, is not new. They first emerged in the Global North in the 1980s as part of a wider strategy of infrastructure development. PPPs were presented as a means to raise finance without increasing public sector debt. They were also heralded as a way to avoid perceived public sector inadequacies through greater involvement of private sector agents with alleged efficiency and cost effectiveness advantages. By the late 1990s, PPPs were being promoted across the Global South by a number of bilateral and multilateral agencies as the solution to growing demands for public services and the advocacy efforts in favour of PPPs have strengthened in the last few years. Yet, there remains an acute lack of scholarly work on the effects of PPPs within and across sectors in the developing world. Critics have argued that there is insufficient evidence to support many of the claims and assumptions surrounding the presumed benefits of PPPs and their wider ability to contribute to poverty reduction or to address inequalities. Another concern in drawing conclusions regarding the effectiveness of PPPs is that PPP research has tended to remain in sector-specific silos and has failed to address cross-sectoral linkages, challenges or insights. This constrains evaluations of PPPs in general as a means to overcome inadequacies in the public sector. Further, PPP is a loose term that covers a wide range of arrangements across different sectors and it is open to a diverse range of interpretations (IOB, 2013; Languille, 2016; Romero, 2015). This needs unpicking in an attempt to draw lessons regarding PPP outcomes in the developing world. Finally, both the current promotion of and opposition to PPPs largely fail to address some fundamental questions regarding the nature and history of both the public and private sectors in particular regions and countries. The complexities of what constitutes the public and private sectors (types of actors), the nature of PPP partnerships (types of relationships), and their outcomes including with regard to equity (types of impacts) remain to be investigated. This network seeks to address the need to understand PPP processes across sectors, how PPPs are implemented in practice and what the nature of their effects are in terms of dynamics of inequalities. The network will bring together academics, policy makers, development practitioners and other stakeholders to build capacity to interrogate PPPs as a solution to development challenges. In particular, it seeks to foster cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary fertilization by drawing on academic and non-academic expertise of varying disciplinary and sectoral origin. The network will be organised around two hubs located in India and South Africa, with the co-ordination of network activities located in the UK. It will engage in scoping exercises, hold various consultative meetings and a final full network meeting. It embodies an early-careers and capacity building element through a doctoral student mentoring component and will engage in an active communication strategy both within the network and beyond through a website, intranet, other forms of social media, and provision of web-links to network activities.