Publications
Unravelling the Ps in public–private partnerships for development
With the launch of UN Agenda 2030, public–private partnerships (PPPs) became formalised as both an objective of and a means of implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals. An established policy-oriented research agenda has long sought to make sense of the ‘jungle’ of PPPs by identifying critical success factors and chronic shortcomings. Yet the instrumentalist inclination to evaluate PPPs restricts this agenda’s theoretical horizons. Building on a relatively smaller but significant body of critical PPP work, Agenda 2030 calls for research that embraces the messiness of PPPs and treats the plasticity of the term as a feature to understand rather than a bug to be overcome. To wit, Agenda 2030 advances an inductive approach to exploring the PPP buzzword in its specific enactments and makes the case for problematising the Ps in PPP from the bottom up and from multiple perspectives. Ultimately, Agenda 2030 highlights the theoretical value of escaping the evaluation meta-narrative that delimits the theoretical potential of a great deal of existing research on PPPs for development and PPPs more broadly. In addition to helping inform and enhance our understanding of the contemporary PPP agenda, this approach is useful for making sense of the political and capitalist forces that are shaping not only Ethiopia but the world at large today. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'.
The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development – Insights from Ethiopia
With the launch of Agenda 2030, public–private partnerships (PPPs) were heralded as an important means of realising the UN Sustainable Development Goals and providing more sustainable development financing in the global south. This book explores PPPs from the bottom up, drawing on extensive empirical research in Ethiopia to illuminate the diversity of practices, arrangements and contradictions that the PPP agenda enables, generates and occludes. Despite the omnipresence of PPP talk among governments and international organisations, donor and recipient agencies, and private actors, there exists no universally agreed definition of PPPs, and in practice they encompass a remarkable diversity of activities and arrangements. This book thoroughly examines PPPs in Ethiopia, considering what actors they bring together, what power dynamics they produce, how the dynamics alter them, what PPPs and such dynamics say about changing state–society relations and how the individual Ps of PPPs get infused with context-specific meaning. By investigating how PPPs play out in practice, the book sheds new light on how this ambiguous but proliferating discourse is changing the meanings, processes and mechanisms of international development. This book illuminates the unseen consequences of translating bold sustainable development goals into practice and will be of interest to researchers and practitioners of international development.
From synergy to subsidy – The cultural problem of public–private partnerships in international development
This chapter explores the cultural problem of PPPs. The PPP policy agenda in international development seeks to juxtapose actors with distinct rationales and institutional logics, with the ambition to create synergy between them. In practice, however, the intentional encounter between public and private actors produces interface situations that also amplify the actors’ distinctiveness and thus the cultural problem of PPPs. The chapter draws on data collection in the World Bank and a case study in Ethiopia of a PPP development project involving an NGO and a multinational corporation. This shows the practical renderings and effects of the culture problem, here causing the private actor to withdraw from the partnership and their joint project. Thus, what was meant as a project of synergy becomes a publicly funded proxy and subsidy of private interests. At the general level, the chapter shows how the PPP agenda compels categorisation as either public or private while at the same time it seeks to merge these differences. As such, the interface dynamics and cultural problem are not only produced by the PPP agenda but may also undermine it. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'.
Tracing the travels of a development model
Historicising Ethiopia’s contemporary global Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) agenda, this chapter examines how its contemporary manifestation in Ethiopia bears the imprint of the PPP model’s checkered historical and political trajectory. The underlying analytical gambit is that tracing the ‘travels’ of the PPP model – via analyses of China and the UK’s PPP waves – can both help explain how Ethiopia ended up adopting the model in the first place and understand the distinct form this adoption has taken. In the process, the analysis shows how Ethiopia’s PPP policy relies upon a highly selective process of ‘lessons’ to be ‘learned’ from (un)successful projects that partially but not entirely airbrushes out experiences that would threaten the uptake of the model. These elisions are crucial for imagining that the risks of PPP can be overcome with capacity-building and more rigorous management processes. The chapter contends that this selective learning can help account for the spread of PPPs to Ethiopia and the persistence of the PPP promotion efforts by international financial institutions globally. Taken together, the chapter makes the case for treating the PPP model as an unfolding global process. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'
Conclusion: Public–private relations in the wild
In this conclusion, the authors draw on their readings of all the contributions in 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development: Insights from Ethiopia' to highlight the contributors’ insights and the connections between them, as well as suggest new directions and questions that have been opened up by the volume’s collective analysis. The chapters in this volume illuminate how the PPP agenda is rendered in markedly different ways as it moves from policy to practice despite sustained efforts to refine PPP frameworks and claims about their importance for achieving the UN SDGs and reducing the international development finance gap. By tracing partnership relations over time and across borders within and beyond Ethiopia, the contributors to this volume shed light on messy constellations of actors, institutions and relations that fit – although often uneasily – under the PPP umbrella. They follow public and private configurations, from beer breweries to textile exporters to housing and hospitals, in international development cooperation and around the windowless conference rooms of the World Bank. In this conclusion, the authors suggest that the unruliness, inconsistencies and arbitrariness that emerge through these cases indicate that PPPs can be fruitfully reframed not only as wild but also as situated in the wild. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'.
The Brussels Bubble - Inside the European Union in the Digital Age
What happens when European politics goes digital? Behind the scenes in European Union institutions, a quiet transformation is reshaping the way power works. Based on long-term ethnographic research, this book follows diplomats, civil servants, spokespersons, and interpreters through the corridors, meeting rooms, cafés, and smartphone screens of Brussels' European Quarter. Against the backdrop of Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia's war on Ukraine, it reveals how digital technologies have become inseparable from the practice of international politics—reshaping trust, tact, and authority in unexpected ways. Far from a tale of technological revolution, "The Brussels Bubble" exposes digitalisation as a messy, human negotiation about what diplomacy and Europe itself mean today. Combining vivid narrative with sharp theoretical insight, it offers a rare, inside view of how global governance, technology, and human interaction intertwine at the heart of European power. Drawing on behind-the-scenes access to Brussels during defining crises, this book offers an unparalleled, first-hand view of how EU diplomats navigate technological change and human challenges under intense political and geopolitical pressure. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Norwegian-German space collaboration: A pathway to Europe
This brief examines the renewed Norwegian-German partnership in space and its strategic importance for Norwegian foreign policy and the country’s space ambitions. The analysis explores how the partnership reflects Europe's push for strategic autonomy and assesses how Norway can leverage its unique space assets to secure a stronger role in European space cooperation despite being a non-EU member. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s first visit to Norway at Andøya Spaceport in March 2026 kicked off a new ambition for Norwegian-German cooperation in space, with a focus on space-based surveillance, secure satellite communication, and launch capabilities from the spaceport. The partnership shows new signs of conceptualizing space as a highly cross-sectoral domain where joint capacity-building is needed. Where Germany brings industrial scale and technological breadth, Norway contributes with specialized expertise, research environments, and a unique geographic position for space activities in the High North. The partnership could strengthen Europe’s competitiveness and security, but its success will depend on navigating EU regulations governing third-country participation, ensuring long-term Norwegian investment and engagement, and establishing pathways for collaboration. The collaboration with Germany has the potential to position Norway as a leading Arctic spacefaring nation and a key partner to European in space.
Climate, Peace and Security Fact Sheet — Lake Chad*
Climate change and conflict are deeply intertwined in the Lake Chad region, where resource scarcity, displacement and erratic weather patterns fuel tensions between communities and increase vulnerability to extremist recruitment. This NUPI-SIPRI fact sheet investigates what the UN and its member states should focus on in order to improve the situation in the Lake Chad region.
Lutter contre l’insécurité liée au changement climatique dans la région du lac Tchad
This is a french translation of the report 'Responding to climate change-related insecurity in the Lake Chad region'
Preventing climate-change related conflict: Why Artificial Intelligence (AI) alone won’t close the early-warning response gap
Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings new opportunities and challenges to international efforts to warn about and respond to climate change-related conflict. This policy brief discusses the benefits and risks of AI-enhanced Conflict Early Warning and Early Response (CEWER) systems for climate-induced conflict, demonstrating that the effectiveness of such systems depends on how well they can be aligned with context-specific approaches to data analysis. In this policy brief the author recommends the following: • International partners should prioritise supporting locally embedded, participatory conflict early warning initiatives that carefully balance technical sophistication with local needs. • National civil society organizations should increase their capacity to engage with AI systems and AI-generated information, to support the integration and uptake of AI-driven early warning systems among local communities. • Research organisations and technology companies that build and supply AI-powered early warning systems should adopt human-centred design approaches.