Equalities in Public Private Partnerships (EQUIPPPS)

This proposal seeks funding for a Strategic Network to identify research gaps and formulate a research agenda on Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) in developing countries across four sectors: education, health, housing and water. PPPs increasingly play a significant role in the financing and delivery of public services. They are deemed to offer potential for addressing inequalities in provision and access to public services across the Global South. As such, they are promoted as an important development financing mechanism in support of the Sustainable Development Goals (see SDG 17.3 and the Addis Ababa Declaration of the Third United Nations Financing for Development Summit, July 2015).
The occurrence of PPPs, however, is not new. They first emerged in the Global North in the 1980s as part of a wider strategy of infrastructure development. PPPs were presented as a means to raise finance without increasing public sector debt. They were also heralded as a way to avoid perceived public sector inadequacies through greater involvement of private sector agents with alleged efficiency and cost effectiveness advantages. By the late 1990s, PPPs were being promoted across the Global South by a number of bilateral and multilateral agencies as the solution to growing demands for public services and the advocacy efforts in favour of PPPs have strengthened in the last few years.
Yet, there remains an acute lack of scholarly work on the effects of PPPs within and across sectors in the developing world. Critics have argued that there is insufficient evidence to support many of the claims and assumptions surrounding the presumed benefits of PPPs and their wider ability to contribute to poverty reduction or to address inequalities. Another concern in drawing conclusions regarding the effectiveness of PPPs is that PPP research has tended to remain in sector-specific silos and has failed to address cross-sectoral linkages, challenges or insights. This constrains evaluations of PPPs in general as a means to overcome inadequacies in the public sector. Further, PPP is a loose term that covers a wide range of arrangements across different sectors and it is open to a diverse range of interpretations (IOB, 2013; Languille, 2016; Romero, 2015). This needs unpicking in an attempt to draw lessons regarding PPP outcomes in the developing world. Finally, both the current promotion of and opposition to PPPs largely fail to address some fundamental questions regarding the nature and history of both the public and private sectors in particular regions and countries. The complexities of what constitutes the public and private sectors (types of actors), the nature of PPP partnerships (types of relationships), and their outcomes including with regard to equity (types of impacts) remain to be investigated.
This network seeks to address the need to understand PPP processes across sectors, how PPPs are implemented in practice and what the nature of their effects are in terms of dynamics of inequalities. The network will bring together academics, policy makers, development practitioners and other stakeholders to build capacity to interrogate PPPs as a solution to development challenges. In particular, it seeks to foster cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary fertilization by drawing on academic and non-academic expertise of varying disciplinary and sectoral origin.
The network will be organised around two hubs located in India and South Africa, with the co-ordination of network activities located in the UK. It will engage in scoping exercises, hold various consultative meetings and a final full network meeting. It embodies an early-careers and capacity building element through a doctoral student mentoring component and will engage in an active communication strategy both within the network and beyond through a website, intranet, other forms of social media, and provision of web-links to network activities.

We are seeking to integrate impact from the start of the project through the design of the network activities. This will be operationalized by involving through interviews and invitation to the consultative meetings a wide range of PPP stakeholders, including policymakers, advocacy organisations, development practitioners, and by allowing feedback from each consecutive phase in the network's activities to inform subsequent phases. This should allow for new research agenda and policy issues to become identified as the network activities unfold as well as to benefit from progressive feedback through the different activity phases. Our non-academic co-Investigator from Education International will assist in broadening the appeal of the network's activities from the start. The local hubs will also work closely with various local non-academic stakeholders. Finally, members of the Steering Committee straddle academic and non-academic environments and will provide guidance on how to broaden the beneficiaries of the networks' activities beyond academic circles.

The network activities (outlined in the case for support) are designed to promote learning across the hubs and information sharing in all directions (South-South, South-North and North-South). Moreover, network meetings will be livestreamed to enable maximum user engagement and regular social media updates will ensure that stakeholders remain fully informed of network findings and activities.

It is envisaged that the network will benefit a wide range of stakeholders through on-going discussions of cross-sectoral and cross-country PPP policies and outcomes. At the same time, the network will connect researchers with policy makers and civil society representatives to promote a cross fertilization of dialogue on PPPs. The activities of the network will also strengthen our engagement with various civil society organisations that engage with PPP realities, including Eurodad, Global Justice Now, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the Right to Education, Public Services International, and other.

One key element of the impact of the Strategic Network will be the development of a new analytical and policy frame through which we can understand PPPs across sectors, countries and regions. This will enable future research and provide empirical evidence to guide policy making that will promote sustainable development. The success of the network will be evident in the development of a collaborative research proposal to take this work forward as well as cross-country, cross-sector information sharing that will inform future debates around PPPs and will be made widely accessible via our social media outputs. Contact will be maintained via the network's website and this will be used, alongside the network meetings to promote user engagement and disseminate findings to stakeholders working in this area.