Making sense of the growing body of literature on Public Private Partnerships is a daunting task. Not only are there various scholarly streams, but these also differ greatly by region (US, Europe, etc.). There are two recent articles that I have found very helpful in differentiating between the various streams of research.

Firstly, Guri Weihe (Weihe, G., 2008, "Ordering Disorder - On the Perplexities of the Partnership Literature," The Australian Journal of Public Administration, vol. 67, no. 4, pp. 430 - 442.) provides a helpful taxonomy for grouping literature streams. She identifies four broad approaches in the literature: (i) the Urban Regeneration Approach, (ii) the Policy Approach, (iii) the Infrastructure Approach, and (iv) the Development Approach.

Kwak et al. (Kwak, Young Hoon, YingYi Chih, and C. William Ibbs, "Towards a Comprehensive Understanding of Public Private Partnerships for Infrastructure Development," California Management Review Vol. 51, No. 2 Winter 2009) provide a helpful addition to this in their review of the literature on infrastructure PPPs. Their conceptual framework groups PPP research into five categories: (i) Government's Roles and Responsibilities, (ii) Concession Selection, (iii) PPP Risks, (iv) PPP Finance, and (v) Critical Success Factors/Barriers for PPPs.

Stephan Jooste
Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects
Stanford University

Posted by dcjaya at April 20, 2009 8:17 PM