Transnational Public Private Partnerships: Handmaidens of Empire or Counter-Empire?

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to critically discuss the effect of the public-private complexity on the empowerment of the multitude within the (re)construction of the contemporary world order. In particular I will question the role and meaning of public-private partnerships as ‘transnational’ instruments’. The ozone and climate change regimes are taken as examples of how the idea and practice of public-private partnerships gain firm ground and how the participation of the multitude became formalized. The connected problems of ozone depletion and climate change were politically acknowledged in the 1985 Vienna Convention on the Protection of the Ozone Layer and 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. These international legal regimes, provide the framework for a critical analysis of what I will understand as the historical and the ideational problematic of the public, the private and the civil society beyond-the-state. The Global Gas Flaring Reduction Public-Private Partnership (GGFR-PPP) provides a telling illustration of that general critique.