Abstract
Since 1987, members of the United Nations have strived for improving sustainability to fulfill the vision of sustainable development. Current discussions focus on the role of collaborations between public and private actors to realize social, ecological, and economic sustainability. This study explores how public–private partnerships may contribute to the achievement of sustainability-related outcomes by analyzing a longitudinal case in the German public bathing and swimming pool sector. The empirical findings illustrate how both external conditions, such as regulation or industry-self regulation, and internal elements, such as specific structure and process elements of the public–private partnership, contribute to sustainability-related outcomes. Results reveal an interaction of specific external conditions and some internal elements. Our findings serve as a starting point for further empirical investigations of the sustainable provision of public services via public–private partnerships, and form a basis for theory development. The revealed insights result in practical implications for partners involved in public–private partnerships.
Highlights
Since 1987, members of the United Nations (UN) have been striving to improve sustainability in their countries to fulfill the vision of sustainable development (World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) 1987, known as the Brundtland report)
This study explores how public–private partnerships may contribute to the achievement of sustainability-related outcomes by analyzing a longitudinal case in the German public bathing and swimming pool sector
We develop a conceptual framework which integrates the external conditions and internal elements that may relate to the achievement of sustainability-related outcomes in public–private partnerships, and apply this framework to a single case study of a public–private partnership in the German public bathing and swimming pool sector
Summary
Since 1987, members of the United Nations (UN) have been striving to improve sustainability in their countries to fulfill the vision of sustainable development (World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) 1987, known as the Brundtland report). At the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 (United Nations 2002), public–private partnerships were promoted as a promising instrument for the sustainable provisioning of public services (Dellas 2011; Pattberg et al 2012). This perspective has been strengthened with the Agenda 2030 and the 17 sustainable development goals (SDG; see United Nations 2015): Public sector actors work together with private sector actors to accomplish sustainability-related objectives (Pinz et al 2018). As the current literature addresses sustainability issues in combination with public–private partnerships rather implicitly than explicitly (e.g., Kwak et al 2009; Pinz et al 2018), there is little knowledge on the contribution of public–private partnerships to sustainability
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