I’ve heard some variant of this phrase for a good while now, but, what does it really mean?
Becca Vargo Daggett has often addressed the vacuity of this meme… but I think we need to be more aggressive in disentangling the motives behind this phrase.
It’s pretty clear it’s either a point of rhetoric, or the result of framing that has been used to box out certain options.
I most recently heard the phrase at the Community Media Summit convened by the Benton Foundation and the Community Media Workshop (June 15, 2007). At the Summit the Chicago Report on Digital Excellence was unveiled. Rep. Julie Hamos stood up shortly following a comment by Gordon Quinn. The summit and the report had a strong focus on the questions of Municipal Wireless and other communications infrastructure.
Gordon asked a very clear question as to the presence or lack of political will to just provide the infrastructure ourselves, as a city. (I’ll pass over the near deafening silence this was met with, though this is the crown that should most clamor for it.)
Rep. Hamos praised the vision articulated in the Digital Excellence report and cited the need for a similar bold vision and plan for the state of Illinois. She commented that the sentiment among the political establishment is a preference for public-private partnership in the field of communications/network provision, rather than direct public investment of the sort Gordon proposed.
In telecommunications and other new networks, the community, the public, the people will always pay for the network in the long run, and generally speaking, they will pay many times over. There is no getting around that. We will pay for the networks. Should we subsidize their build-out?
So, what is behind the language of the public-private partnership?
One thing is certain, public officials (and perhaps much of the public) have lost an appreciation for the meaning of public utility. Many of the entities we formerly regarded as public utilities have been deregulated, or operate with minimal regulation.
Criticism of the situation marks one as anti-business or anti-corporate. These are not strictly the same thing, but that is part of the point… the view that Business is Business is Business conflates all business interests in one frame.
We then easily succumb to the argument that we need to keep Government from competing with Business… else it will be bad for all businesses, else it will adversely affect the employment base, else these corporations may disinvest in your state or town.
I don’t buy any of it, but it appears the threats work, or they work enough to take away the courage and conviction…
Telecom and media infrastructure, including provision of Internet services is by no means a competitive market. Nor is it effectively regulated at any level. That is not to say there arent regulations in effect… no, there are, and they tend to serve as barriers to market entry more than as protection of community and consumer interests.
So, please, tell me, what is the virtue of a public-private partnership other than 1) the term partnership gives us the warm fuzzies, 2) public figures can point to projects moving forward (much ado about nothing?) … and a third false-virtue: private sector capture of lucrative contracts and markets through political influence and incumbent positioning.
There is a lot more to be said about this phrase… perhaps the most damning is that it is a catch-all and offers no hope for precision. It doesn’t articulate a clear business model, but it is used to shape the business model and ownership debate in any number of sectors. Isn’t it great to see the power of rhetorical strategy… how public discourse can be derailed away from clear business and public interest questions through vacuous and emotive concepts?
Is it any wonder our public leaders won’t stand up for pubic initiatives?
I feel your pain, Michael. Policy academics and professionals have been grappling with this new “cross-sectoral governance” thing for 2-3 decades now, and it’s still a work in progress. That said, there are ways to make it work, and ways to ensure it is an utter failure. With anything as general as “public-private partnerships” the devil is most certainly in the details.
What this means can vary in different cases, but it usually involves private provision of some service under public supervision (and therefore still presumably accountable to the public via the public governance system).
The putative goal of this sort of thing is to avoid the inefficiencies of public bureaucracies that can be havens for waste, corruption and misaligned priorities. So the idea is to have private firms provide the service, but to do so under some form of effective public regulation. (Note: A contract between a government and a private service provider is a form of regulation that is specific to that particular context and relationship.)
Where this stuff generally goes wrong is in the accountability structure. The contract can fail to contain proper controls on provider behavior (bad negotiations by public officials, but then would you trust them to do better if they were designing direct public provision of service?), the contract can fail to be effectively enforced (lots of other laws can also fail to be effectively enforced), or the provider can fail in its duties to provide the service (in the public sector this usually just leads to delays and cost overruns and budget deficits).
I am as annoyed by deregulationists as anyone: the point of public-private partnerships is not to deregulate! In fact, it generally leads to *more* regulation, if one includes contracts in that class, as one should. The goal is to allocate to each side of the partnership the functions that it does best. Private firms are not very good at public accountability, and public bureaucracies are not so good at efficient use of resources without competitive market pressure applied to them (governments are by definition monopolies of control over the public interest).
That said, there are all sorts of ways that this attempt to get the best balance can be screwed up. Regulation is often ineffective, as you say, and that is a flaw in implementation of a partnership, but that is not an intrinsic characteristic of all such partnerships.
I would encourage you to continue to criticize the flaws of specific partnerships that do not work, but not to overgeneralize and throw the baby out with the bathwater. The fact is that cross-sectoral governance is not going away any time soon, partly because other purist models of single-sector approaches to policy have clear flaws as well, and we need to experiment with hybrids.
But it is also indisputable that there remain lots of kinks to be worked out in any such hybrid approach between public, non-profit and for-profit sectors (it’s really a potentially 3-way game here, and there are a few instances of 3-way partnerships: for example a water pollution clean-up project such as Heal the Bay in Malibu, CA can involve a municipality working with a non-profit advocate/organizer that manages for-profit contractors and helps raise funding and influence municipal budget priorities and relevant municipal ordinances).
There are some successes, some failures, and some jury-still-out projects. Evaluation of partnership approaches are best done case-by-case. The possibilities for allocating duties between the partners are very wide-ranging and cannot be predicted before a specific case is considered in context.
As for public utilities, especially in the case of natural monopolies such as communications systems, regardless of whether services are delivered directly by government or in conjunction with private service firms, the principles of public benefits (such as universal coverage. non-discrimination, etc.) should still apply no matter what. I think it’s fair to say that even privately-delivered services that are regulated by the public sector can still constitute a “public utility” regardless of the breakdown of functions in any particular partnership arrangement.
One of the pitfalls is when private firms begin to think that they are just running a typical business with a typical business partner, and forget that they are intended to be structurally accountable to the public interest (or else they wouldn’t have the business at all). Sometimes government and the public can forget this too, and in those cases you’ll definitely get problems in implementation.
The solutions to the pitfalls of partnerships are to keep clear what the goals and responsibilities are, to make sure the contract or other governing regulation is properly designed, both for outcome and for enforcement, and that resources for enforcement are built into the picture systematically. And then, of course, sunshine disinfects all things: make sure the spotlight of transparent monitoring is never obscured.
This is hard work, and not easy to accomplish, just like everything else in the realm of public governance. No silver bullets. But just because there is a hybrid/partner arrangement is not a guarantee that the public interest will not be served. Neither does it guarantee the public interest *will* be served.
In the end it comes down to the specific people involved, especially the individual leaders, both from public and private sectors. I would argue that the private sector leadership should include public advocacy from non-profits that address such issues.