Roger Wettenhall

The Rhetoric and Reality of Public-Private Partnerships

Abstract“Public-private partnership” (or “PPP”) is now a very-fashionable concept in discourse about public sector management. For many, following a British lead, it focuses on attracting private financing for public projects. However there are several other forms of public-private mix that are also often described as partnerships, and some of them are not nearly so new. This article notes that several nodes of interest have developed to explore these mixes/partnerships, and raises some questions about them. We should consider whether all such mixes can properly be described as partnerships. Also we need to know more about their long history, to investigate the possibility of developing a classificatory system to help us better understand the various forms, and to consider what conditions are necessary for successful mixing or partnering, in particular for protecting the public interest at a time when market forces exercise great power.

Exploring Types of Public Sector Organizations: Past Exercises and Current Issues

Classification is important generally as an aid to better understanding of complex phenomena. In the context of public sector understanding and reform, it should have added importance as a guide to policy makers and reformers. There have been some notable efforts to classify public sector organizations, mostly built on interactions between analysts and the reformers themselves. One such mid-20th century exercise postulated a division of public sector organizations into three categories: departments, local governments, and “the rest” embracing a mass of quasi-autonomous agencies. The developments of the later 20th century, often associated with changing views about the role of the state, have increased the complexity of this third category and have imposed new pressures on our understandings, with the result that there is now a renewed interest in classification issues.

Public or Private? Public Corporations, Companies and the Decline of the Middle Ground

In the era of New Public Management in the Anglo-Saxon countries, governments have become infatuated with things private and disparaging of things public. This dramatic attitudinal shift has been reflected in the importation of private sector business method into so much of what government does, and in the championing of “privatization” in its various forms as a way of reducing the size and importance of public sectors. The change represents a retreat from the more traditional acceptance that a valuable social purpose was served by “middle ground” structures and activities located in the outer parts of these public sectors, i.e., between the highly politicised cores of government systems and the highly commercialised institutions of private enterprise. In particular, this article argues that the form of the public (or government, statutory or crown) corporation epitomised such social value, and that the state-owned company which is now so often replacing it represents an abandoning of social value.

ActewAGL: a genuine public‐private partnership?

Purpose – There are two connected purposes: to reflect on the widespread current use and abuse of the term “public‐private partnership”, and to present a case study of an unusual joint venture associating a public and a private enterprise in delivering a multi‐utility service in the Canberra region of Australia.Design/methodology/approach – The article combines the case study method with a review of relevant discourse about PPPs.Findings – On the case study evidence presented, the article concludes that this joint venture comes much closer to being a genuine public‐private partnership than many arrangements loosely described as PPPs today.Practical implications – The article invites the practitioner/academic community to think more precisely about the factors that need to be considered before it is appropriate to claim that a PPP exists.Originality/value – The joint venture that is the subject of this case study has not previously been analysed in this way. The article suggests that it has value in servin...

Public management and organizational autonomy: the continuing relevance of significant earlier knowledge:

A key theme of recent reforms in public management in various countries is the perceived need for many organizations in government to have a degree of legal and operational autonomy. In studying this and other aspects of the reforms, there is considerable merit in examining how the underlying ideas have been explored in earlier works. In this article, we argue that this is particularly relevant to the current interest in organizational autonomy. Pertinent ideas, issues and concerns were addressed several decades ago by scholars such as Macmahon, Seidman, Selznick and Follett. The contributions of these scholars have continuing analytical value and deserve to be revisited.

Organisational amnesia: a serious public sector reform issue

Purpose – However well‐intentioned are public sector reform movements, they are often compromised by misunderstandings about meanings and directions and by the organisational amnesia that comes from too rapid change and too little attention to the past. A better appreciation of these problems is needed. This paper aims to address these issues.Design/methodology/approach – The paper combines discussion about factors that inhibit successful outcomes of many reform programmes with examples drawn mostly from the Australian experience.Findings – Reform programmes are likely to have better outcomes if they are designed with these possible impediments in view. Similarly theoretical understandings will be safer and sounder if more attention is given to administrative history and more care is taken to reconcile conflicting views.Originality/value – The paper focuses on issues that have not been given much attention in the literature of public sector reform.

Public-Private Mixes and Partnerships: A Search for Understanding

The idea of the public-private partnership (PPP) has become one of the dominant forces in public sector reform over the recent period. Its advocates have no doubt that it leads to a better future, particularly in the area of infrastructure development. But there are many critics who point out variously that the advantages are not nearly as great as the advocates assume, that the practice itself is not so new, that most of the infrastructure deals are not real partnerships, and indeed that the field is compromised by a massive confusion of meanings. Not surprisingly, a search has begun for a classificatory system which will help sort out the variety of arrangements now loosely described as PPPs and so aid better understanding of the field. This article traces these problems and developments in understanding.

Ownership and Management in the Public Sphere: Governance Issues and Concerns

This article identifies a number of ways in which governance thinking has raised issues of ownership and management in organisations with public-serving roles. It tracks backwards to consider how such issues have been handled in the past: notably in the theory and practice of socialisation and nationalisation, in the adoption of cooperative and mutual forms of organisation, and in the use of enterprises mixing public and private ownership, with some fairly novel recent developments being noted. It then explores how these arrangements are affected by various rights to own and manage organisations and by the ways in which such rights can be exercised to protect and promote significant interests. The questions and issues considered suggest useful lines of future organisational inquiry.

Understanding integrity in public administration: Guest Editors' Introduction

Though they may differ in identifying all the causes, few contemporary observers would dissent from the proposition that there has been an upsurge of interest worldwide in issues of integrity and trust in government over the past generation, linked with a longer-standing concern about corruption. This general condition of modern governance has interacted with several developments within the study and the practice of public administration in Australia out of which the set of articles making up this special issue of Policy Studies has emerged. As Head points out in the article that follows, the Fitzgerald Report which lifted the veil on connections between corruption and the quality of public administration in the State of Queensland in 1989 was of epoch-making importance for Australia, for it convincingly preached the need for system-wide and not just piecemeal solutions to the identified problems (Fitzgerald 1989). On a broader level, Transparency International (TI) incorporated this thinking into its global anticorruption efforts, and produced its highly influential scheme for a ‘national integrity system’ based on eleven ‘institutional pillars’ (Pope 2000). The TI national integrity system included agencies like independent audit offices, ombudsman offices and anticrime commissions among its institutional pillars, and emphasised their great importance for the achieving of good governance. Other international bodies took up the challenge and issued supporting and extending documents which were widely distributed around the world. The energy of Australian academia was also invoked, and a major research project, with TI support, emerged on mapping the integrity systems of the several Australian jurisdictions and evaluating their effectiveness (see Head’s article in this collection). This research was widely publicised and debated through the Australian public management community, and it has provided one of the triggers for this special issue. In his contribution to this issue, Mark Evans argues that integrity in public administration is a composite quality that comes from the positive interaction of competence (being free from maladministration), transparency and accountability, linked with constant vigilance against corruption all of which can be said to promote public value. Integrity can be seen as a methodology for achieving good governance, ‘otherwise known in mature democracies as representative, responsible and accountable government’, and in practice it has several components. As Evans points, out, integrity must be ensured in respect of: Policy Studies Vol. 33, No. 1, January 2012, 1 5

Dynamics of public ownership and regulation

This editorial addresses the origins of our interest in the dynamics of public ownership and regulation. Issues of ownership and regulation remain firmly on the public agenda, with key themes involving distinctive patterns and trends over time, ongoing state involvement in significant areas of activity, and particular concerns in the provision of hospital and water services. These and related themes are addressed in the following articles.