The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development

With the launch of Agenda 2030, public-private partnerships were heralded as an important means to realise the Sustainable Development Goals and to provide more sustainable development financing in the global south.

This book explores public-private partnerships from the bottom up, drawing on extensive empirical research in Ethiopia to illuminate the diversity of practices, arrangements and contradictions that the public-private partnership 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 PPP, and in practice it encompasses a remarkable diversity of activities and arrangements. This book zooms in on public-private partnerships in Ethiopia, considering what actors they bring together, what power dynamics they produce, how it alters them, what it says about state-society relations and how it infuses the individual Ps of PPPs with context specific meaning. By investigating how public-private partnerships 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 strategies into practice, and will be of interest to researchers and practitioners of international development.