Public–Private Partnership: A Delusion for Urban Regeneration? Evidence from Italy

Abstract

Public–private partnership (PPP) is currently sought by scholars and policy-makers as a tool for overcoming the financial crisis of the State and low performance in public administration. Also, it is deemed as an opportunity to bring added value to projects and their contents in order to meet new, emerging social demands. Despite the growing attention paid to PPPs, international literature has been questioning their actual effectiveness and viability. PPPs suffer indeed from a lack of strategy-making and dynamism in public sector organizations: public action geared towards private business cooperation requires advanced accounting, management and steering skills that cannot be easily developed. Such issues match with the latest developments in the field of urban regeneration and represent a major stake for local governments. On the basis of empirical evidence from Italian urban regeneration projects, the paper highlights an actual paradox for urban policies. Even when favourable conditions for project management are met in the public sector, PPPs seem either unable to deliver innovative solutions or secure an actual, long-term engagement of private and public resources.

Notes

European Union, State Ministries and regional governments have been using grant schemes for financing urban regeneration proposals submitted by local governments: the presence of preliminary agreements between the public and private sectors is often used as a selection criterion on these occasions. The formation of partnerships has been supported in the frame of the European Community Initiatives issued by General Directorate for Regional Policies and the European Commission. Also, Ministries from several member States have replicated this scheme: in the Netherlands, the Ministry for Housing and Planning (VROM); in the UK, the former Deputy Prime Ministry Office; in France, the Ministère de le Equipement; in Italy, the Ministry of Public Works and the Ministry for Transport and Infrastructures and similarly in many other countries.

In order to gather and process information about the ongoing experiments, a number of National Governments have been promoting the formation of observatories for PPPs—consisting of governmental agencies that provide technical support for public administrations, as in Ireland and the Netherlands (Teisman et al., 2004). Elsewhere, non-profit organizations were created with the purpose of publishing highly valued information for professionals and investors (for example, the Canadian Council for Public Private Partnerships—CCPPP).

The snapshots are drawn from an in-depth analysis of PPP projects (Codecasa, 2008). Case studies are drawn on a series of semi-structured interviews with project managers and secondary sources of information (internal reports, policy documents, project briefings, local press articles) from October 2005 to January 2008.