Is public-private partnership a suitable prescription for water services-related illness ?

Abstract EN

Since it has been pioneered in 1990s, Public-Private Partnership grows rapidly worldwide and many governments look at this approach as a new avenue to make a revolutionarily change in the ill conventional ways they manage and deliver water services to their communities.

In the existent literature there are many main reasons for this accelerated uptake of PPPs, among which this paper focuses on relieving governments of the burden of investment financing, bringing in the needed investment, enhancing efficiency at lower public cost, extending the coverage of service, safeguarding the public interest, and providing transparency hypotheses and aims to identify whether they are justified compared to real practice.

The comprehensive revision of relevant published materials concludes that there is a contradictory between theory and practice and calls for further investigation for the sake of revealing and dealing with failures’ roots.