Transnational Public-private Partnerships Research Articles

Actors, alterations, and authorities: three observations of global policy and its transnational administration

Abstract This Special Issue and its seven contributions seek to shift the gaze of public policy scholarship toward the authorities, legitimacies, and influences of transnational actors on the creation and implementation of global policy and its transnational administration. It is, in large part, both a demonstration of the analytical and explanatory value of accounting for the influence of non-state actors on global issues as well as a normative reflection on what this means for already tenuous connections between publics and those that make decisions on their behalf in global forums. This Issue breaks with heterodox public policy approaches that center on the capabilities of states and international organizations to determine and to deliver global public policy and outcomes. Instead, we widen our gaze to capture the influence of transnational actors such as global commissions, transnational public–private partnerships, philanthropic foundations, non-government organization networks, domestic associations with global influence, quasi-judicial authorities, and global citizen activists. The articles discuss the impact of transnational actors on the policy and administrative spaces of global actors and states alike. By dispensing with the notion that the state and state-created international organizations are the primary locus for public policy and public administration scholarship, the included papers conclude with the implications for scholarship on transnational actor authorities and legitimacies.

An Evaluation of Project Risk Dynamics in Sino-Africa Public Infrastructure Delivery; A Causal Loop and Interpretive Structural Modelling Approach (ISM-CLD)

Africa’s growth in public infrastructure provision has been fueled by the collective effort of the government authority and foreign private investors. China, through state-owned corporations, has become one of the leading infrastructure financier springing up numerous projects in transport, energy, oil and gas, water, and sewage sectors in Africa. Infrastructure procurement in developing countries comes with complexities and uncertainties. While Sino-Africa transnational public–private partnerships (TPPP) are becoming an increasingly popular route for public infrastructure procurement, their specific project risks and dynamics are not yet fully understood due to the typical assessment of risk autonomously. This paper identifies pertinent project risks in Sino-Africa TPPPs and applies system thinking in evaluating their behaviour and dynamics. An extensive review of literature and expert opinion employing semi-structured interviews was adopted in the identification and assessment of risk factors. Additionally, the study applied causal loop and interpretive structural modelling as an integrated approach in the assessment of risk behaviour from a systems perspective. Results indicate that risk factors associated with Sino-Africa TPPPs are interactive and portray curious systemic behaviour. Risk factors like force majeure and others associated with the governance structure and stability of the host African country are most influential, and their occurrence could inhibit project success. The study recommends that in conjunction with the conventional risk assessment by impact, systems thinking can be adopted to evaluate and comprehend the dynamics and interactions amongst the risk factors. This will improve risk assessment efficiency and fair allocation and treatment of risks as a conduit for project success and promote a win–win partnership for project actors.

Public-private partnering as a modus operandi: Explaining the Gates Foundation’s approach to global health governance

ABSTRACT In its first decade, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) focused much of its efforts on enabling the establishment of transnational public-private partnerships (PPPs) oriented towards increasing low-income country (LIC) access to essential health technologies. Critics have argued these efforts further enriched already profitable firms which long ignored the needs of populations with limited purchasing power, while lessening political will to invest in urgently needed public sector capacity to produce essential health technologies independently of market pressures. Missing from these critical analyses were the perspectives of those shaping BMGF’s global health programming. Drawing on interviews with senior BMGF staff and external affiliates undertaken between 2010 and 2012, this article seeks to address this gap. We argue that BMGF’s embrace of PPPs was adopted out of the belief that neither public agencies nor industry were capable of providing LICs with essential health technologies autonomously, and that their conflicting mandates required an honest broker to initiate and sustain collaboration between the two sectors. The Foundation’s comparative advantage in global health governance was thus seen by those informing its work, as its capacity to negotiate such partnerships, which we argue has also been the basis of its agenda-setting influence in this domain.

Choosing low-cost institutions in global governance

AbstractContemporary global governance takes place not only throughs formal inter-governmental organizations and treaties, but increasingly through diverse institutional forms including informal inter-governmental organizations, trans-governmental networks, and transnational public–private partnerships. Although these forms differ in many ways, they are all what we call ‘low-cost institutions’ (LCIs): the costs of creating, operating, changing, and exiting them, and the sovereignty costs they impose, are substantially lower on average than those of treaty-based institutions. LCIs also provide substantive and political governance benefits based on their low costs, including reduced risk, malleability, and flexibility, as well as many of the general cooperation benefits provided by all types of institutions. LCIs are poorly-suited for creating and enforcing binding commitments, but can perform many other governance functions, alone and as complements to treaty-based institutions. We argue that the availability of LCIs changes the cost–benefit logic of institutional choice in a densely institutionalized international system, making the creation of new institutions, which existing research sees as the ‘last resort’, more likely. In addition, LCIs empower executive, bureaucratic, and societal actors, incentivizing those actors to favor creating LCIs rather than treaty-based institutions. The availability of LCIs affects global governance in multiple ways. It reduces the status quo bias of governance, changes its institutional and actor composition, enables (modest) cooperation in times of polarization and gridlock, creates beneficial institutional divisions of labor, and expands governance options. At the same time, the proliferation of LCIs reduces the focality of incumbent institutions, increasing the complexity of governance.

Evaluation and Ranking of Risk Factors in Transnational Public–Private Partnerships Projects: Case Study Based on the Intuitionistic Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process

AbstractDue to the growing trend of world economic globalization and “The Belt and Road” initiative launched by the Chinese government, transnational public–private partnership (TPPP) has become a ...

Transnational Public-Private Partnerships as Learning Facilitators: Global Governance of Mercury

Drawing from theories of regime interplay and social learning, this article investigates linkages between hybrid governance schemes and intergovernmental regimes. My analytic framework suggests that, by enhancing cooperation among stakeholders, transnational public-private partnerships will facilitate policy-makers’ learning, and accordingly advance the formation of intergovernmental regimes. Here I use qualitative methods to examine the influence of the UNEP Global Mercury Partnership on negotiations over different components of the Minamata Convention on Mercury. Technical and scientific information provided by this partnership helped relevant policy-makers understand the problems to be addressed and some appropriate solutions, thereby accelerating the consensus-making process and shaping the features of certain provisions. I also compare the influences of different partnership areas, revealing that inclusive stakeholder engagement and boundary coordination between different governance schemes are two important conditions for transnational partnerships to promote cooperation in intergovernmental fora.

New Perspectives on Transnational Public-Private Partnerships: A Critical Analysis of the United Nations-Business Partnership

This paper critically assesses the United Nations-business partnership since the establishment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. This study provides a critical overview of relevant theoretical approaches, buttressed by evidence from public-private partnership cases. Applying international relations (IR) theories permits qualitative research on, and future evaluation of, the partnership’s emergence. This study finds that while we see core elements of the rational choice perspective in the formation and implementation of the UN-business partnership, we see its legitimization via constructivist rhetoric–even for cases where the neo-Gramscian view is compelling. While traditional PPPs are often transnational, the mood articulated by the UN may have shifted goals for “private” parties, with firms’ motivations moving from a purely for-profit stance to one that embraces more social responsibility; goals also shifted for “public” parties, from state to interstate objectives, and from micro (infrastructure) to macro (shared development goals) objectives.

New Perspectives on Transnational Public-Private Partnerships: A Critical Analysis of the United Nations-Business Partnership

New Perspectives on Transnational Public-Private Partnerships: A Critical Analysis of the United Nations-Business Partnership

Globalizing ‘Girl Power’: Corporate Social Responsibility and Transnational Business Initiatives for Gender Equality

The recent emergence of ‘transnational business feminism’ [Roberts, A. (2014). The political economy of ‘transnational business feminism’. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17(2), 209–231] accompanied by numerous ‘transnational business initiatives for the governance of gender’ [Prügl, E., & True, J. (2014). Equality means business? Governing gender through transnational public–private partnerships. Review of International Political Economy, 21(6), 1137–1169] constitutes a significant area of debate in the feminist political economy literature. In this paper I focus on the confluence of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda with the visibility of gender issues in development and the resultant corporate agenda for the promotion of women and girls’ empowerment. The paper draws on two gender-focused World Bank collaborations with private sector actors: the Global Private Sector Leaders Forum and the Girl Effect campaign. The paper argues that the dominant model of corporate citizenship inscribed within the discourse of transnational business initiatives is framed in terms of capitalizing on the potential power of girls and women, achieving an easy convergence between gender equality and corporate profit. I suggest that the construction of an unproblematic synergy between these goals serves to moralize corporate-led development interventions and therefore does not challenge corporate power in the development process, but instead allows corporations to subscribe to voluntary, non-binding codes and cultivate a socially conscious brand image.

Comparative Study of Child Soldiering on Myanmar–China Border

Although the persistent and widespread use of child soldiers by the Myanmar Army (Tatmadaw Kyi) and ethnic minority militia makes this an important country study, the very conditions of authoritarian control that have protracted the conflicts have also hindered scholars from gaining access to zones of conflict. In his book,Comparative Study of Child Soldiering on Myanmar-China Border: Evolutions, Challenges and Countermeasures, Kai Chen compiles an extensive collection of reports and studies conducted within Myanmar for his analysis that will be welcome to scholars interested in the complexities influencing child soldiering in modern conflicts generally and Myanmar particularly. He also provides an excellent overview of the scholarly debates and tensions regarding the definition of a child soldier as well as the use of the age of 18 years to demarcate the end of childhood within international accords. Overall, however, the book may be somewhat ambitious in its proposed scope. Chen states that the purpose of his book is fourfold: (1) to compare the situation of child soldiers on the Myanmar–China border along several dimensions, including across time and between different regions and actors; (2) to address the structural factors influencing child soldiering; (3) to introduce what Chen refers to as Ba new approach of ‘limited statehood’ into the studies of child soldiering^ (p. 6), which is the basis for his premise that there is no optimal solution to governing child soldiering on the Myanmar–China border; and consequently (4) propose the use of transnational Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) as the next best alternative. Chen draws from the work of Schaferhoff et al. (2009) who define PPPs as Bcontinuous and relatively institutionalized trans-boundary interactions between public and private actors that formally strive for the provision of collective goods, whereas private actors can be for-profit and/or civil society organizations (p. 12).^ Chen asserts that Ba proper transnational PPP should be characterized by the following elements: first, non-hierarchical relationships among all and only relevant partners (e.g., civil society organizations, international NGOs, local NGOs and transnational corporations); second, priority given to disadvantaged groups; third, risk allocation between the public and private sectors; fourth, trust building Asian Criminology (2015) 10:303–305 DOI 10.1007/s11417-015-9213-2

Equality means business? Governing gender through transnational public-private partnerships

ABSTRACTFrom the World Bank's ‘gender equality is smart economics’ to The Economist's ‘womenomics’ and Nike's ‘girl effect’, feminism seems to have well and truly penetrated the business world. Government action on behalf of gender equality is well institutionalized but private corporations appear as a new actor in this cause. This article asks: What do businesses and their public partners do in order to advance gender equality? What motivates their engagement now and how does it fit into existing public and private relationships of power? What do they mean for feminist agendas? How legitimate are they? And how effective are they? To address these questions the article examines four exemplary initiatives involving businesses in advancing gender equality and women's empowerment: the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Global Initiative, the World Economic Forum's Women Leaders and Gender Parity Program, the European Union's Programme on Gender Balance in Decision-Making Positions, and the UN Global Compact-UNIFEM Women's Empowerment Principles for Business. Our purpose is to conceptually locate these initiatives as new private forms of governance involving partnerships with governments. We assess these initiatives employing criteria of feminist evaluation and find decidedly ambiguous results. We argue that the new attention to gender equality in business and global economic governance is both an expression of and a key process in the transformation of states and corporations in the context of global competition and restructuring.

Transnational Partnerships: Conditions for Successful Service Provision in Areas of Limited Statehood

Transnational public–private partnerships (PPPs) are external governance actors in the field of development cooperation and vary in composition, potentially including nonprofit and for‐profit organizations, state and public agencies, and intergovernmental organizations. This article analyzes the conditions under which PPPs have been successful in providing access to basic services (water, sanitation, and food) in areas of limited statehood in Bangladesh, India, and Kenya. We focus on 10 projects carried out by two PPPs that differ in two key respects: legitimacy and institutional design. We show that partnerships with high empirical legitimacy and an appropriate institutional design are best able to fulfill complex tasks in contexts of limited statehood. A participatory approach can promote legitimacy and thus success; projects that lack legitimacy are prone to failure. Additionally, a project's institutional design must address problems that commonly affect areas of limited statehood: It should provide access to resources for capacity development, ensure adequate monitoring, and be tailored to local needs.

Boomerangs to Partnerships? Explaining State Participation in Transnational Partnerships for Sustainability

This article examines under what conditions states engage in transnational public–private partnerships for the environment. While there is hardly a disagreement in the literature on the rise of transnational actors and new modes of collaborative governance, their interaction with and impact on state institutions remain debated and insufficiently illuminated by empirical research. Some scholars of globalization interpret transnational partnerships as evidence of state insufficiency and retreat, others emphasize the continued primacy of state power in manipulating old and new institutional arenas, still other scholars anticipate the “rearticulation” of the state to partake in new governance. This study is one of the first to examine theoretically and empirically, using a sample of some 230 partnerships, how domestic capacity, the constituencies of transnational actors, as well as international donors and institutions shape the variable rearticulation of the state to partake in partnerships. A comparative case study of Brazil and Russia provides further detail on the political dynamics that enable or constrain state-society collaborations for the environment.

Transnational Public–Private Partnerships' Performance in Water Governance: Institutional Design Matters

Transnational public-private partnerships (PPPs) are new forms of governance that have caught the interest of researchers in recent years. While the literature tends to portray PPPs as loosely institutionalized forms of governance, we argue that PPPs' institutional design varies and matters for their effectiveness. We aim to demonstrate that a high degree of institutionalization (obligation, precision, delegation) is relevant in cases that involve collective action problems—that is, for those PPPs that have to deal with distributional conflict, cheating, or free-riding. To substantiate our argument, we compare and analyze the performance of three transnational water partnerships (not to be confused with municipal for-profit PPPs). Our results confirm that a high degree of institutionalization tends to be important for those water partnerships that implement costly projects. It is less important for those that focus on the comparatively undemanding task of exchanging and disseminating knowledge and best practice in water management and governance.

Collective Remittances and Migrant-State Collaboration in Mexico and El Salvador

AbstractAs part of an emerging research agenda on the political impact of remittances in high-migration countries, this article explores the conditions under which organized migrants are likely to engage in transnational public-private partnerships with their home governments through a comparison of Mexico and El Salvador. Both countries have well-organized migrants who have cofinanced community projects back home. But this collaboration has been more sustained, multifaceted, and negotiated in Mexico than in El Salvador. These outcomes are linked to four factors: the density and type of migrant organizations, the territorial distribution of state authority and resources, the extent and nature of diaspora outreach, and legacies of state-society relations. The article discusses how this framework might be applied to other high-migration countries and whether there is room for agency in creating more favorable conditions for migrant-state collaboration.

Which Conditions Favour the Emergence of Transnational Public Private Partnerships in the CEE and CIS Countries?

Which Conditions Favour the Emergence of Transnational Public Private Partnerships in the CEE and CIS Countries?

Public private partnerships in global food governance: business engagement and legitimacy in the global fight against hunger and malnutrition

This article compares two transnational public–private partnerships against hunger and malnutrition, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition and the International Alliance Against Hunger with regard to their degree of business involvement and their input and output legimacy. We examine the participation of stakeholders, the accountability and transparency of the decision-making process, and the perceived provision of a public good. We identify a link between business involvement and output legitimacy, and we discuss the implications for public and private food governance.

Transnational Public-Private Partnerships in International Relations: Making Sense of Concepts, Research Frameworks, and Results

Transnational public-private partnerships (PPPs) have become a popular theme in International Relations (IR) research. Such partnerships constitute a hybrid type of governance, in which nonstate actors co-govern along with state actors for the provision of collective goods, and thereby adopt governance functions that have formerly been the sole authority of sovereign states. Their recent proliferation is an expression of the contemporary reconfiguration of authority in world politics that poses essential questions on the effectiveness and the legitimacy of global governance. In this article, we critically survey the literature on transnational PPPs with respect to three central issues: Why do transnational PPPs emerge, under what conditions are they effective, and under what conditions are they legitimate governance instruments? We point to weaknesses of current research on PPPs and suggest how these weaknesses can be addressed. We argue that the application of IR theories and compliance theories in particular opens up the possibility for systematic comparative research that is necessary to obtain conclusive knowledge about the emergence, effectiveness, and legitimacy of transnational PPPs. Furthermore, the article introduces the concept of complex performance to capture possible unintended side effects of PPPs and their implications on global governance.

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

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.