International finance institutions and the public-private partnership dilemma
Summary:
Over the last decade, leading international finance institutions (IFIs) have devoted considerable resources seeking to revive public–private partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure. This renewed PPP agenda has sought to learn from the model’s checkered track record and the ‘evidence-based critique’ that emerged in its wake. Indeed, rather than dampening enthusiasm for PPPs, this critique has inspired IFIs to elaborate a growing array of best practices and institutional reforms intended to help governments avoid past mistakes and thereby undertake PPP programmes that achieve value for money at scale. Despite these efforts, the pipeline of PPPs has stagnated. Taking stock of the agenda’s results and conducting a close reading of the new PPP guidance, this article suggests that this outcome is neither surprising nor necessarily a failure. By developing rigorous mechanisms for achieving value for money and thus adding complexity and transaction costs, the new PPP agenda helps governments avoid predation but at the cost of appealing to the private sector. Rather than ushering in a new dawn of PPPs, the agenda simply moves the dial on what the article terms the PPP Dilemma: whereby governments must choose between a high-volume but low-quality PPP world and a low-volume but high-quality PPP world.
- Published year: 2026
- Full version: Read the article here.
- Language: English
- Journal: New Political Economy
Written by
Paul Beaumont
Senior Research Fellow