ABSTRACT
The article starts a conversation in the literature about the governance structures of certain kinds of collaboratives in public management: public-private partnerships. The findings come from the study of implemented partnerships for regeneration and management of city centres in the U.S. (Business Improvement Districts) and U.K. (Town Centre Management), and the introduction of urban regime theory. A three-ideal typology is built up, concerning the roles played by structures/design of the partnership, legal frameworks, incentives, evolution, competition, governance structures, and the ways all of these evolve. The conclusion is that public-private partnerships are constantly evolving and may assume “variable geometries” in response to the form of governance dominating their internal arrangements. Partnerships may be of various kinds: symbolic partnerships, in which hierarchical governance predominates; instrumental partnerships, which obey market rules; organic partnerships, where the predominant form of governance is network-based. The kind of PPP employed affects how the relationship between public and private organisations is managed.
Notes
Peters (Citation1998) differentiates partnerships both from single transactions or subsidies—which do not imply real continuous interaction—and from purchases and services obtained from the same supplier, because the contract between both parties is based on a previous competitive process and is not the result of a continued relationship.
Business Improvement District (BID) partnerships analysed in the U.S.
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Town Centre Management (TCM) partnerships analysed in the U.K.
In the United States, BIDs receive various names: Special Assessment Districts (SADs), Downtown Improvement Districts (DIDs), Special Improvement Districts (SIDs) and Business Improvement Zones (BIZs) (Rothenberg Pack Citation1992; Hambleton and Taylor Citation1993; Mallett Citation1993; Bradley Citation1995).
There is currently BID legislation in Canada, England, New Zealand, South Africa, Serbia, Albania, and the U.S. There are bills going through parliament in Japan, Ireland, Scotland, Austria, Germany, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Romania.