is a professor of law and director of the Centre for Regulatory Studies at Monash University, Australia. A leading international analyst on privatization, outsourcing, and public -private partnerships, he has served as a special advisor to several parliamentary committees and inquiries. He has published in social and economic policy, public administration, law, governance, regulation, and management and has acted as a consultant on governance matters in Australasia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and China.

Private finance-based infrastructure public–private partnerships (P3s) are globally popular, including renewed interest in the United States, but their performance remains contested. This article explores the meaning of P3 and the notion of P3 success, and points to multiple interpretations of both. It proposes a new conceptual model of the P3 phenomenon, including five levels of meaning: project, delivery method, policy, governance tool, and cultural context. Numerous criteria exist on which the success of P3 might be judged. These are as oriented toward politics and governance as they are toward more traditional utilitarian policy goals concerned with project delivery, or value for money (VfM). Indeed, governments have dozens of different goals in mind. Given mixed international results to date for VfM, it is posited that to the extent that infrastructure P3s continue to show popularity, governments may stress P3 success more on the basis of political and governance strengths, than utilitarian characteristics.

Accepting that there is much confusion in current debates about the use of public-private partnerships for public infrastructure projects, the article begins by considering the emergence of the 'PPP phenomenon' as a 'governance scheme' and as a 'language game'. The existence of several types of so-called PPPs, and motives for them, is noted, as are criticism of loose assumptions about them in the debates. The argument then focuses on private finance initiative (PFI) schemes as one branch of cross-sectoral mixing arrangements, and examines the benefits and costs of using this mechanism. The conclusion is a pessimistic one: in the PFI arrangement, the potential for the interests of the advocating government and the business partners to dominate over the public interest has been palpable. There is an urgent need to explore further the merit of these infrastructure 'partnerships' to ensure that they do advance the public interest.

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This paper argues that evaluations of public-private partnerships thus far point to contradictory results regarding their effectiveness and value-for-money. Despite continuing political popularity, greater care is needed to strengthen future evaluations and conduct such assessments away from the policy cheerleaders.

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