With the launch of Agenda 2030, public–private partnerships (PPPs) were heralded as an important means of realising the UN Sustainable Development Goals and providing more sustainable development financing in the global south.
This book explores PPPs from the bottom up, drawing on extensive empirical research in Ethiopia to illuminate the diversity of practices, arrangements and contradictions that the PPP agenda enables, generates and occludes. Despite the omnipresence of PPP talk among governments and international organisations, donor and recipient agencies, and private actors, there exists no universally agreed definition of PPPs, and in practice they encompass a remarkable diversity of activities and arrangements. This book thoroughly examines PPPs in Ethiopia, considering what actors they bring together, what power dynamics they produce, how the dynamics alter them, what PPPs and such dynamics say about changing state–society relations and how the individual Ps of PPPs get infused with context-specific meaning. By investigating how PPPs play out in practice, the book sheds new light on how this ambiguous but proliferating discourse is changing the meanings, processes and mechanisms of international development.
This book illuminates the unseen consequences of translating bold sustainable development goals into practice and will be of interest to researchers and practitioners of international development.