Evaluating Collaborative Public–Private Partnerships

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings

Public–private partnership models designed to facilitate greater collaboration have become increasingly popular. Scholarship on these partnerships has shown that they rely less on contracts and more on trust between partners, engage private partners early to allow for participation in project visioning, and prioritize shared decision making. However, there is a need to further define collaborative partnerships and distinguish them from more conventional models. In addition, research into the impacts of collaborative partnerships within planning processes is limited, and additional insights into their administrative structures, management, and internal dynamics is needed. I respond to these gaps by analyzing the collaborative co-creation public–private partnership formed to plan a smart city in the Quayside district of Toronto (Canada). Drawing on interviews (N = 35), participant observation, and document analysis, I found that those qualities of the Quayside partnership typical of collaborative partnership models reduced governmental oversight, facilitated conflicts of interest, and afforded the private partner substantial power. The challenges precipitated by the partnership structure were amplified through its application in a smart city context, where the private partner was a technology corporation with expansive resources and ambitions. Based on these findings, I argue that collaborative partnerships pose significant risks of privatizing planning processes and that these risks are heightened when asymmetries between partners are particularly stark.

Takeaway for practice

Planners should not allow a desire for greater collaboration to overshadow the necessity of divisions between public and private roles, because tension between the two is vital to partnership success. If seeking deeper collaboration, planners should ensure that responsibilities are clearly detailed in contracts to avoid ambiguities or conflicts of interest. This is especially important in projects where power differentials between partners are too significant to rely solely on trust instead of contracts.

Keywords:

• privatization
• public–private partnerships
• smart city

Research Support

This work was supported by the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance at the University of Toronto.

Disclosure Statement

The author declares no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this article.

Acknowledgments

I thank Ann Forsyth and the three anonymous reviewers for their thorough and insightful comments and all participants in this study. I also thank Deborah Leslie, Susannah Bunce, Shauna Brail, Katharine Rankin, Paul Hess, Pierre Filion, and Robert Lewis for providing helpful comments on early drafts of this article.

Notes

1 See, for example, Alizadeh et al. (2017), Clark (2020), Cowley and Capriotti (2019), Ferreri and Sanyal (2018), Goodman and Powles (2019), Heaphy and Wiig (2020), Hollands (2015), Kitchin (2015), Sadowski and BenDor (2019), Söderström et al. (2014), Vanolo (2014), and Zukin (2020).

2 Institutional issues refers to the legislated authorities of the public partner and its ability to enforce regulations, contractual issues relate to the details of the contracts between partners (including risk allocations), and managerial issues are those that pertain to the procurement process, including accountability, competition, and feasibility (Xiong et al., 2018).

3 For example, in their analysis of the Google Fiber smart city project in Kansas City (MO), Alizadeh et al. (2017) found that the local government allowed Google to take on the primary direction role within the partnership, which led to the development of local policies that directly benefited the company.

4 Through Alphabet Inc.’s subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs.

5 Waterfront Toronto had never used a competitive dialogue procurement process before, nor had it previously been applied in Ontario. However, the Ontario provincial government had expressed interest in it (Province of Ontario, 2016). See the Ontario Auditor General’s report (Office of the Auditor General of Ontario, 2018) for a thorough review of procurement process concerns.

6 Flynn and Valverde (2019) pointed out that contract agreements characterized Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs as independent contractors, not partners.

7 Local residents began voicing concerns about the lack of public participation in the Quayside procurement and Sidewalk Labs’ influence in the planning process at the onset of the project. However, the leak of Sidewalk Labs’ internal documents in February 2019 revealed the company’s intention to expand its scope beyond Quayside and into the larger Port Lands area and motivated a group of residents to collectively organize a more formal resistance campaign called Block Sidewalk (Block Sidewalk, 2019a; Cardoso & O’Kane, 2019). Block Sidewalk grew to more than 1,000 supporters, including digital justice and affordable housing advocates, business leaders, real estate developers, criminology and privacy researchers, technology and governance experts, and both political conservatives and progressives (Block Sidewalk, 2019b). Block Sidewalk focused its criticism on the corporate power of Sidewalk Labs (see Carr & Hesse, 2020) and the lack of accountability and transparency in the public engagement process, which was led by Sidewalk Labs because of the co-creation partnership structure. Block Sidewalk’s campaign was influential, and participants noted that it contributed to Waterfront Toronto’s efforts to create a more inclusive engagement process following the MIDP publication and played a role in Sidewalk Labs’ eventual decision to walk away from the project. Although organized resistance is common within large-scale participatory planning processes, Block Sidewalk’s effectiveness was rare in the context of top-down smart city planning. My research has identified the campaign’s rootedness in the locally specific dimensions of community organizing in Toronto as one of the reasons for its success.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kate Nelischer

KATE NELISCHER ([email protected]) is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University at Buffalo.