Transnational Partnerships

Effectively Providing for Sustainable Development?

M. Beisheim, A. Liese, M. Beisheim, A. Liese

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137359520
• eBook ISBN: 9781137359537
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Why are some transnational public-private partnerships (PPPs) highly effective, while others are not? The contributors compare 21 transnational PPPs that seek to provide collective goods in the field of sustainable development.

Part I

Introduction and Analytical Framework

1

Introduction: Transnational Partnerships for Sustainable Development

Marianne Beisheim, Andrea Liese, and Jasmin Lorch

Transnational public–private partnerships (PPPs) are a relatively new form of governance. By governance we mean ‘the various institutionalized modes of social coordination to produce and implement collectively binding rules or to provide collective goods’ (Risse, 2011b, p. 9). In PPPs, non-state actors (such as non-profit organizations and companies) work with state actors (such as intergovernmental organizations and public donor agencies) across multiple transnational, national, and local levels to provide collective goods. One could say that these diverse actors ‘co-govern’, thereby performing functions that until recently were generally regarded as the sole responsibility of sovereign states, at least in the ‘OECD world’ (Liese and Beisheim 2011, p. 115; OECD, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

Our volume analyzes PPPs in the area of sustainable development governance, where they have been hailed by some as a ‘silver bullet’ to promote implementation of international development goals. In this vein, Michael Doyle, Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), stated, for example, that ‘making business and all actors of civil society part of the solution is not only the best chance, it may also be the only chance the UN has to meet its Millennium goals’ (Michael Doyle as quoted in Malena, 2004, p. 2). In this field, the UN Global Compact (GC) is one of the earliest and most visible PPP initiatives. PPPs gained further prominence after the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in 2002. In 2012, during the Rio+20 Partnership Forum, the UN Secretary-General praised them once again as ‘a central means of achieving our core mandates’ (UN Secretary General as quoted in Chandavarkar and Chaves, 2012). But, are PPPs effective in the provision of governance? And, if so, where and why?

This volume provides an in-depth account and analysis of 21 transnational partnerships for sustainable development and 45 PPP projects in so-called areas of limited statehood. We start by discussing the buildup and structure of PPPs to provide a better understanding of who governs the PPPs in our study. We then assess the performance of these PPPs to determine whether they have achieved their core goals. First, we evaluate their overall effectiveness: that is, we measure the extent to which the PPPs achieve their goals on an aggregate level. Second, we evaluate the effectiveness of PPPs’ local projects in areas of limited statehood in South Asia (in Bangladesh and India) and East Africa (in Kenya and Uganda), where we focus on 45 projects undertaken by four service-providing partnerships. The central aim of the volume is to identify the conditions under which these transnational PPPs are successful in providing collective goods (from clean water to child immunization) in areas of limited statehood. Our project is part of a larger Collaborative Research Center (SFB 700) program that addresses the question of how effective and legitimate governance can be provided sustainably in areas of limited statehood (Krasner and Risse, 2014; Risse, 2011c). Quantitative research on this subject has shown that there is no linear causal relationship between the degree of statehood and the provision of collective goods (Lee et al., 2014). While governance services and collective goods are clearly provided best in states with consolidated statehood – that is, states that exercise a monopoly over the use of force and that possess strong capacities to make and implement rules – service provision in areas of limited statehood varies widely (Risse, 2011b). This is not surprising if one bears in mind the multitude of efforts by so-called external governance providers – whether international organizations, national development agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), or PPPs – either to assist local actors in the provision of collective goods in such areas or to provide these goods themselves. We focus on the latter aspect, where PPPs act as a particular type of external governance actors in areas of limited statehood. Why are some of these transnational PPPs highly effective, while others are not?

Our explanatory model builds on theories from International Relations to develop hypotheses about the conditions required for transnational PPPs to be effective. We ask: Does limited statehood influence the effectiveness of a PPP and how does the institutional design of the PPP matter in that context? This focus on features of institutional design in PPPs is unique and has provided valuable new insights.

The main argument we make in this volume is that institutional design matters. In particular, precise and obligatory rules and independent monitoring are necessary to ensure that standards are set and met, and that services are planned and made available. In addition, PPPs need what we call ‘good process management’ to accommodate the interests of the heterogeneous actors involved and to adapt to local and regional specificities where necessary. In particular, it is important for an institutional structure to strike a balance among precise and obligatory rules, independent supervision, and sufficiently flexible and adaptive strategies. In the context of limited statehood, we find that PPPs have to win local support to be effective, for example, by including community organizations and by taking local habits and customs into account. These findings allow us to re-examine and challenge commonly held assumptions and to create a more nuanced picture of what is still a new tool of development policy.

The following section discusses the state of the art in the research on transnational partnerships in areas of limited statehood, examining two separate strands of literature that are relevant for the core questions of this volume. First, we review the literature on transnational partnerships, which has discussed issues of effectiveness in detail but has seldom studied and compared effectiveness at the local level. Second, we review the literature on governance in areas of limited statehood and fragile states. In our discussion of these two strands of research, we define the core concepts used in this volume and situate our work within the larger academic and policy-oriented literature on transnational partnerships. Both Sections 1.1 and 1.2 also delineate the research gap that we intend to fill. While it is well known that countries with weak state institutions and a history of violent internal conflicts are more prone to fail to achieve their development goals (World Bank, 2011), little is known about the conditions under which PPPs are able to compensate for weak statehood and achieve the desired results. Our research thus also contributes to the debate on whether PPPs offer an alternative to traditional approaches to state-building and institution-building.

1.1 Transnational PPPs as governance actors

After the 2002 WSSD in Johannesburg, 348 partnerships for sustainable development were registered in the database of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD); a revised registry is currently under construction (UNDESA, 2013). Partnerships are now active in most international policy fields (Hale and Held, 2011). They have been promoted as a means to overcome the widespread failure to implement international policies and targets (Nelson, 2002a; Reinicke et al., 2000; Witte et al., 2003a; Witte and Reinicke, 2005). Many of them work toward the achievement of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation of the WSSD, or other outcomes of global summits.

Partnerships have become not only a hot topic in international politics but also a heavily debated issue in the governance literature (see, for example, Andonova, 2006; Bäckstrand, 2006a, 2006b; Bailes, 2004; Börzel and Risse, 2005; Brühl, 2007; Bull and McNeill, 2007; Ottaway, 2001; Vaillancourt Rosenau, 2000; Wolf, 2006, 2008). In this volume, we analyze partnerships as ‘governance tools’ (Börzel and Risse, 2005; Schuppert, 2011) that are created by both public and private actors. All health, social, water, or energy PPPs examined here have been organized at the transnational level but aim to improve the provision of collective goods, mainly at the national or local level. In the OECD world, community-level PPPs often complement or supplement governmental regulation or services (Vaillancourt Rosenau, 2000). Yet in areas of limited statehood, the situation is quite different. Here, partnerships may create rules or offer services that had not existed previously, or may take over service provision in situations of state failure (Börzel and Risse, 2005; Posner, 2004, p. 239). The transnational PPP Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), for example, works to facilitate access to water and sanitation for people in urban slums – areas that tend to be underserved by public and private service providers. To achieve their objectives, transnational PPPs like WSUP often create their own rules and regulations – sometimes referred to as ‘soft law’ or ‘project law’ (Randeria, 2007) – that may replace or even compete with state regulations. Hence, we refer to the work of PPPs as a form of governance provision. As most PPPs do not have the ability to enforce rules, however, they rely on non-hierarchical modes of governance. And indeed, in none of the 21 cases in our sample did the respective governments either initiate or manage the PPP. Transnational development partnerships are thus distinct from community-level PPPs, which merely fulfill the tasks that have been delegated to them by state authorities or which serve in contracting out or in build–operate– transfer models of service privatization (see the debate in Mitchell-Weaver and Manning, 1991).

Most of the early literature on transnational partnerships assumed that PPPs are by definition an effective tool. Linder and Vaillancourt Rosenau (2000, p. 5), for example, defined them as ‘cooperative relationships between government, profit-making firms, and non-profit private organizations to fulfill a policy function’, implying that PPP members do indeed cooperate and that PPPs do deliver. Nelson and Zadek (2000, p. 14) went even further in their positive assessment by defining PPPs as composed of ‘people and organizations from some combination of public, business, and civil constituencies who engage in voluntary, mutually beneficial, innovative relationships to address common social aims through combining their resources and competencies’. It is frequently assumed that PPPs are more effective than either strictly public or strictly private governance because they pool the resources of different actors. According to this view, PPPs bring in private money and expertise, allow for burden-sharing, and thereby lead to win-win situations. Reinicke et al. (2000, pp. xii, 57, 113) argued, for instance, that PPPs narrow the ‘operational gap’ that has opened up wherever public policymakers have found themselves lacking the information, knowledge, and tools they need to respond to the complexity of governance in a globalizing world. Another frequent assumption in the literature is that the private sector can contribute the material resources and knowledge that public actors lack, while the public sector offers legitimacy (Börzel and Risse, 2005, p. 209). Beyond the often-mentioned aspect of pooling resources, the inclusion of norm addressees – for example, the companies that would be subject to new rules – in multi-sectoral partnerships is debated as a viable strategy to increase compliance with agreements and to promote the implementation of the norms (Beisheim and Dingwerth, 2008; Börzel and Risse, 2005; Dingwerth, 2007). At the same time, PPPs have often been evaluated as differing significantly in both legitimacy and accountability (Bäckstrand, 2012, 2006b; Dingwerth, 2007; Steets, 2010).

Critics of PPPs often question whether they succeed in providing collective goods to a significant degree. The most fundamental critique has described PPPs as a neoliberal policy instrument that merely advances the special interests of private business (Richter, 2003; Utting and Zammit, 2009; Zammit, 2003). A more moderate critique points out typical risks and negative side effects of private sector involvement, such as a fragmentation of the UN system, ‘market multilateralism’, and the redesigning of public policies according to private interests rather than public needs (Brühl, 2007; Bull et al., 2004; Bull, 2010; Martens, 2007). Some critics have cast doubt on the value of PPPs in improving governance and providing collective goods in developing countries (Compagnon, 2012; Miraftab, 2004).

Thus, the current literature on international development reflects a long-standing debate between proponents and critics of PPP activities. In this volume, we argue that PPPs are neither as successful as their proponents claim nor as dysfunctional as their critics argue. Indeed, we observe a remarkably wide variation in the effects of PPPs’ work, especially in areas of limited statehood. We therefore seek to paint a fuller and more accurate picture of PPPs’ successes and failures and to explain the observed variation in effectiveness. For this purpose, we make use of an explicitly non-normative definition of transnational PPPs as ‘institutionalized transboundary interactions between public and private actors that aim at the provision of collective goods’ (Schäferhoff et al., 2009, p. 455).

There is a long list of pioneering publications on early experiences with partnerships dating from the post-1992 Rio process to the 2002 Johannesburg Summit (among others mentioned before, see Hale and Mauzerall, 2004; Reinicke et al., 2000; see also the literature discuss...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Part I: Introduction and Analytical Framework
• Part II: Case Studies: Effectiveness and Internal Dynamics of Different Types of Transnational PPPs
• Part III: Case Studies: Local-Level Projects of Service Partnerships in East Africa and South Asia
• Part IV: Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index