Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical assessment of legal and regulatory impediments to effective governance of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in Kazakhstan. Design/methodology/approach – The qualitative study develops propositions from the PPP literature and then tests them against findings from in-depth interviews. Interviewees have been selected by a purposeful sampling from PPP projects in Kazakhstan as well as from national and regional PPP centres. Findings – The identified barriers to effective PPP management include irregularities in the PPP legal framework, such as lack of legal definition of a PPP and controversy with the government guarantee’s legal status for its long-term payments to partnerships; bureaucratic tariff setting for partnership services; non-existent opportunity for private asset ownership; and excessive government regulation of PPP workers’ wage rates. Practical implications – The partners’ opposing perspectives on a number of PPP issues show that management needs to identify and carefully reconcile stakeholder values in a partnership in order to achieve more effective PPP governance. Practitioners, particularly those in the public agencies, have to be concerned with ways to reduce the government overregulation of the private operators, which is likely to result in greater PPP flexibility in management and, ultimately, higher efficiency in delivering the public services. Originality/value – By elucidating multiple examples of overregulation and PPPs’ inefficiency, the paper demonstrates that the government dominance in PPP management is conceptually inappropriate. Instead, the government should adopt the concept of co-production and manage its relations with the private sector partner in a collaborative fashion.

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are employed in many countries as an alternative method of public service provision in which partners from the public and private sectors share their resources, responsibilities, and risks.  Some well-justified factors that drive the partnership development are value for money and lack of budget funding.  As PPP drivers may be unique, thepaper surveys the reasons for PPP expansion in two transitional countries, Kazakhstan and Russia.  Based on detailed discussion of the commonly employed reasons for partnering (such as greater value for money, or lower total social cost associated with a PPP as opposed to contracting out a service), internal and external PPP drivers in Kazakhstan and Russia have been categorized and examined.  Among internal drivers, the need to attract private initiative and funding for upgrading the utilities and housing infrastructure is most influential because of enormity of the task for which governments lack resources.  The countries’ intention to align themselves with the requirements of perceived international best practices is yet additional influential driver of external nature.  The paper concludes that public policy in the two countries is the major driving force for PPP development although the value for money concept and transaction cost economics appear to be neglected.  The emerging PPP policy paradigm in Kazakhstan and Russia has facilitated PPP development in recent years, since 2005.  However, lack of reliable solutions and instruments for PPP formation and implementation significantly slows down PPP expansion.

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The paper proposes a conceptual model to understand female entrepreneurial leadership through an exploration of the perceptions and experiences of women entrepreneurs within their leadership roles. The paper addresses an existing knowledge gap on entrepreneurial leadership by bringing together three key constructs of gender, leadership and entrepreneurship. We apply Stewart's model of role demands‐constraints‐choices (DCC) to women entrepreneurs in Kazakhstan in order to understand their perceptions of the demands, constraints and choices they experience within their leadership roles. The results of in‐depth interviews with women entrepreneurs present deeper conceptualization of their leadership enactment as a co‐developing, co‐constructed relational activity between leaders and others in their wider business environments and context.

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Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are new in Russia and represent project implementation in progress. The government is actively pursuing PPP deployment in sectors such as transportation and urban infrastructure, and at all levels including federal, regional and especially local. Despite the lack of pertinent laws and regulations, the PPP public policy quickly transforms into a policy paradigm that provides simplified concepts and solutions and intensifies partnership development. The article delineates an emerging model of Russia's PPP policy paradigm, whose structure includes the shared understanding of the need for long-term collaboration between the public sector and business, a changing set of government responsibilities that imply an increasing private provision of public services, and new institutional capacities. This article critically appraises the principal dynamics that contribute to an emerging PPP policy paradigm, namely the broad government treatment of the meaning of a partnership and of a contractual PPP; a liberal PPP approval process that lacks clear guidelines and consistency across regions; excessive emphasis on positive PPP externalities and neglect of drawbacks; and unjustifiably extensive government financial support to PPPs. Whilst a paradigm appears to be useful specifically for the policy purpose of PPP expansion, it may also mask inefficiencies such as higher prices of public services and greater government risks.

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