Veronica Vecchi - Public Private Partnerships: Principles for Sustainable Contracts

Cover pattern Melisa Hasan

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book has been conceived for professionals, working for public authorities, corporates, financial investors and development banks, and MSc and executive students in order to offer a broad and practical yet concise perspective on public-private partnerships (PPPs), for infrastructure development and service delivery.

Over the last 20 years, PPP has been playing a crucial role worldwide in the matching of public and private resources to close the infrastructure gap and to bring innovation to the way public services are delivered. However, it is in the aftermath of Covid-19 that PPP can play an even more strategic role. On the one hand, public debt has massively increased, thus making the involvement of private capital a priority; on the other hand, the urgency to boost GDP and employment and tackle social issues calls for a renewed use of PPP. Indeed, PPP offers not only macroeconomic benefits; it can also be a way to stimulate innovation, thanks to the know-how of economic operators and the nature of the contract (whose main feature is balanced risk allocation between authorities and private players). The latter, however, has remained in the background so far.

Today, we are not only tending to the extraordinary challenges raised by Covid-19, but also witnessing the unprecedented commitment of industrial and financial investors toward public value generation. Therefore, it is urgent and fundamental to learn how PPPs can be designed and implemented to support economic and social recovery.

A PPP is a complex contract and it has been applied so far with mixed results. In the public and private sectors, competencies are key to understanding and overcoming the weaknesses experienced so far and to approaching PPP with a different, long-term, value co-creation perspective. Until the end of 2019, PPP was seen just as a way to develop infrastructures in contexts with limited budgets. In the aftermath of Covid-19, it is no longer just a matter of mixing public and private capitals; there is now the need for a co-evolution of the public and private sector, to find joint solutions to a changed world.

This book has been written in order to support this co-evolution and, as a first step to triggering and developing it, a common background of essential principles is required.

This book mainly provides principles, based on the academic and professional experience of the authors, that have to be tailored in order to be applied across sectors and jurisdictions. PPP works well when a contract is designed on the basis of the specific needs and contexts. We refrain from standard solutions and a me-too approach, which did not work in the past. To share essential principles, we chose Palgrave Pivot, whose format is ideal to spread the essentials of a topic, thus making them accessible to practitioners (managers and policy makers).

We do hope readers can find in this book not only an opportunity to learn but also the inspiration to approach PPP with such a different perspective.