Abstract
AbstractBusiness has been involved in cooperation with multilateral organizations through public-private partnerships (PPPs) since the late 1990s. With their adoption of the sustainable development goals (SDGs), multilateral institutions increasingly consider partnerships as a means to achieve their goals given their own limited implementation capacity. However, the global economic order has changed significantly since the first expansion of PPPs, particularly due to growing participation by non-western states and companies. This article asks how this shift has changed the eagerness to form partnerships, as well as their qualitative content. It analyzes the 3964 partnerships in the SDG partnership registry, focusing on the subset of them that includes business partners. We divide these into five groups: local implementation, resource mobilization, advocacy, policy, and operational partnerships. We study PPPs involving companies from different varieties of capitalism—private, market based forms, and state-led forms of capitalism. We find that PPPs are still dominated by companies and other actors from Western countries. Moreover, business participate more in U.S.- and Canadian-led partnerships than others. We also find strong differences regarding what category of PPPs that companies from different backgrounds engage in, and discuss the linkages between varieties of capitalism and PPP participation.
Highlights
Starting in the late 1990s, public-private partnerships (PPPs) became a key feature of the modus operandi of multilateral organizations
The United Nations defines PPPs as: “Voluntary and collaborative relationships between various parties, both State and non-State, in which all participants agree to work together to achieve a common purpose or undertake a specific task and to share risks and responsibilities, resources and benefits.”1 In the first decade of the 2000s, PPPs with multilateral organizations arose as a response to changes of the dominant liberal world order due to globalization
There has been a considerable increase in the number of reported partnerships in recent years that seems to be associated with sustainable development goals (SDGs)
Summary
Starting in the late 1990s, public-private partnerships (PPPs) became a key feature of the modus operandi of multilateral organizations. Mechanisms employed to reach the goals of the collaboration make up either for market failures, for regulatory failures, or for the detrimental consequences of oligopolistic market structures.21 This “market multilateralism” was the result of numerous actions (and non-actions) by states, multilateral organizations and businesses that, taken together, shaped the contours of a new form of global regulation.. This “market multilateralism” was the result of numerous actions (and non-actions) by states, multilateral organizations and businesses that, taken together, shaped the contours of a new form of global regulation.22 This literature was mostly written before companies from China and other emerging economies seriously challenged the dominance of large Western corporations. This contrasts to companies from private and corporate capitalist forms where markets, NGOs, suppliers, and providers are expected to be more important These features of the local institutional context may shape the kind of engagement that the different companies show with PPPs in association with multilateral institutions.
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