Panel Paper:
Public-Private Partnerships and Accountability: A Case from the Airport Industry
Friday, April 7, 2017
:
11:05 AM
Founders Hall Room 478 (George Mason University Schar School of Policy)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are seen as cooperative institutional arrangements in funding and maintaining public services. The policy logic of PPPs varies according to the context being analyzed, participants of interaction, their roles and allocation of powers, matureness of governance systems and markets, political situation, and public management environments. However, in general, PPPs can be best defined as contractual agreements between state and a private consortium by which the private firm takes the responsibility for the design, construction, finance, operation, and maintenance of public projects and facilities for a specific period of time, usually 15-30 years. While many scholars have analyzed the effect of public-private partnerships in terms of efficiency, their impact on accountability remains surprisingly scarce. Accountability has been always a challenge for public management and it is even more so in time of reforms when the structure of government-owned firms’ changes. The rhetoric reform usually poses questions of accountability in terms of whether government employees are less accountable after the reform than they were before. I use a single case study approach to analyze the relationship between PPPs and accountability. I make a distinction among legal, political, and professional accountability. Then, I hypothesize that the PPP contract undermines these three types of accountability. The research focuses on a Design - Build - Finance - Operate - Transfer (DBFOT) project in the Airport industry. The standard contract, internal, and external evaluations of the project are analyzed. In addition, seven semi structured interviews were conducted with key stakeholders involved in the case. I apply a coding technique for qualitative data to test the hypotheses. Findings suggest that in the absence of professional bureaucrats the PPP contract can have an impact in legal and political accountability. Whereas, they indicate that the PPP contract does not hinder professional accountability by any means.
