Building walls within walls: Making value defensible in Public Private Partnerships

Abstract

Despite widespread criticisms, governments around the world have adopted Value for Money (VfM) analysis as a key metric in gauging the prospective value of infrastructure projects. This paper examines the institutional processes through which VfM is rendered defensible as a form of valuation. Drawing on a case study of Infrastructure Ontario in Canada, the paper demonstrates that this involves strategies for partitioning space and time, including boundary work, objectification, phasing and outsourcing. We argue that the institution of delays and distances ultimately fosters the displacement of subjectivity in the valuation process while entrenching distinctively financialized understandings of value. Moreover, we demonstrate that this is driven not so much by the organization's desire to control the future but by a defensive orientation that sets out to ward off potential critiques that may arise from project failures.

Keywords:

• valuation
• accountability
• Public Private Partnerships
• value for money
• neoliberalism

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Martin French, Kevin Walby, Eleni Schirmer, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Ethical approval statement

We confirm that prior to starting the study, ethical approval was obtained from Concordia University.

Notes

1 http://www.p3spectrum.ca/project/.

Additional information

Funding

Thanks to the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their support.

Notes on contributors

Chris Hurl

Chris Hurl is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. He is the co-editor of Corporatizing Canada: Making business out of public service (Between the Lines, 2018) and Professional service firms and politics in a global era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and co-author of The consulting trap (Fernwood, forthcoming).

Alia Nurmohamed

Alia Nurmohamed is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University and previously worked in real estate, private equity and development.