Financial Gains and Value Loss? The Impacts of Local Mixed Companies

Abstract

Partnerships between public and private actors have a long historyin Europe and USA. More recently, however, we have been witnessing an extensive use of these instruments, an increasing number of the purposes for which they are used, and a growing ambition to create more stable interactions, e.g. by institutionalizing partnerships as mixed companies. From a democratic perspective this development potentially creates problems in terms of steering and accountability. Questions can be raised about the extent to which partnerships will promote the public interest and defend collective interests. The particular difficulties of mixed companies arise, we argue, from their combining two features. One is the shift in values and the increased acceptance of private-sector values following from the New Public Management reform wave. The second is the way these structures become institutionalized, locking in the value set and making reaction to any changes in social need. The core argument of this article is that the combined effect of these two features represents a significant weakening of public value in mixed companies.

The rise and fall (?) of public-private partnerships in Israel’s local government

“…Safety nets produce unexpected expenditures in BOT contracts, and PFI contracts roll financial burdens onto the future and are especially problematic when aimed to convince the public that major investments could be made without an immediate fiscal burden. MPP also entails loss of flexibility, because the city cedes control over the use of public facilities for decades and unforeseen uses or technologies may entail complex renegotiations and financial compensation to the private partner, or a costly buyback (Francois 2016;Peters, Pierre, and Røiseland 2014;Cruz and Marques 2013). MPP contracts have pitfalls associated with risk miscalculations, such as transferring to the concessionaires demand risks that are beyond their control (Carpintero and Petersen 2016).…”

‘We are this hybrid’: Members’ search for organizational identity in an institutionalized public–private partnership

“…Drawing on Skelcher and Smith (), assimilated hybrids are characterized by a core logic that contains elements of another, making such organizations closer to one partner's logic. Empirical evidence from Peters et al () indicates that in such iPPPs the market logic typically dominates over the state logic. Alternatively, blended hybrids create a new logic from the existing ones.…”

Developing sustainable healthcare governance mechanisms to manage public-private partnerships

“…As the name implies, PPPs involve actors from the public and private sectors who agree to cooperate and to share different types of resources in order to achieve a particular public task. The main characteristic of a PPP, compared with the traditional approach to the provision of infrastructure, is that it bundles investment and service provision in a single long-term contract (Peters et al 2014). The European Commission (2004) listed the following elements that typically characterise a PPP:…”