[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about many of the lesser known problems of PPPs and multistakeholder platforms especially for HR. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
[Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have created so much noise in the last ten years that I thought I here assemble some of this noise in the form of additions to the list of my iron laws. There are so many of them, and so well founded, that I invite you to pick your choice].
- The public-private/multi-stakeholder* ‘not-really-evenhanded-partnership-narrative’ is a most powerful, indeed a hegemonic, sub-narrative legitimizing the neoliberal ideology. Markets have simply been deregulated and re-regulated in the interests of big, including financial, corporations.
*: Public services around the world have subtly shifted their language from talking about ‘citizens’ to talking about ‘customers’. The longstanding UN vocabulary spoke of ‘peoples’, ‘citizens’, ‘communities’, ‘constituencies’ and ‘non-governmental organizations’. Now everyone is a ‘stakeholder’. Even linguistically, ‘multistakeholderism’ is taking us in the wrong direction. (Harris Gleckman)
- Multistakeholder groups and their corporate participants get to choose which policy issues they want to participate-in, picking and choosing the ones likely to generate a profit, increase their rate of return and/or enhance the continued widespread acceptance of globalization. When they do get involved in the governance of the issues they select, they act in such a way as to narrow the range of policy decisions to only those that are compatible with commercial returns. Needless to say, this is not always aligned with the public good. (H. Gleckman)
- PPPs have not delivered despite the promotion by a myriad of PPP advocates. Instead, PPPs have become a major cause for concern. Reliable data on international PPP trends are (perhaps not so innocently) hard to find. Also, different PPP definitions and terminology have confused the reporting. PPPs’ financial impacts to date have certainly been small and the private sector continues to dominate them. Moreover, counted little actual private investment in PPPs goes to lowest income countries. Most such projects are concentrated in a few middle-income countries. (Jomo Sundaram)
- Even the IMF and the World Bank have warned public-private partnerships (PPPs) incur contingent fiscal risks. Moreover, The Economist found that this type of blended finance, i.e., mixing public, charitable and private money has been “starry-eyed” and “struggling to take off”. Worse, PPPs distort national priorities, favor private investors and worsen debt crises. They have also not improved equity of access, have not reduced poverty and have not enhanced sustainability. (J. Sundaram and Anis Chowdhuri)
- Actually, most international financial institutions (IFIs) advise governments to guarantee profits for their private PPP partners. The IFIs continue to urge governments to ‘de-risk’ commercial providers to attract their investments. Following World Bank and other IFIs advice, national authorities attract commercial financial investments by ultimately appealing to private greed. As such:
- PPPs have been used to ‘de-risk’ such investment, by using special PPP terms that ensure profits for private investors.
- PPPs have been more prone to corruption and abuse.
- PPPs have increasingly been (falsely) touted as the magic solution to many problems, particularly financial constraints, poor management and poor delivery of services by the public sector.
- PPPs have become popular among elites in the global South; they allow them to seek government guarantees. But such guarantees often result in additional public debt that is often hidden from the public.
- PPPs have neither (or rarely) delivered better ‘value for money’ nor more efficiently managed public projects.
- PPPs’ efficiency gains have been largely due to risky cost-cutting affecting the public good.
- PPP deals are typically opaque, rather than transparent, often involving abuses and corruption.
- PPPs offer bogus, simplistic, even dangerous solutions.
- PPPs thus need rigorous and transparent government regulation (The public interest must always prevail over commercial interests).
Bottom line
- The PPPs standard setting process is too crucial for the future of our societies to be left to private sector providers and government officers often short on democratic legitimacy. Without the immediate inclusion of the public interest social actors, the risk of misguided investment decisions and related rent-seeking by private and public sector actors in all PPP projects is too high to be left to experts, however competent they may be. (Raymond Saner)
- So, we must stop promoting them; risks must be publicly acknowledged; informed public consultations must always precede any agreement.(J. Sundaram)
The time has come for People-First-PPPs. Any suggestions?
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com