Increasingly, governments are experimenting with ways to provide public goods by involving the private sector in the planning, financing, building and operating of a range of services, facilities, infrastructure, etc. In the geographical literature on neoliberalism this entanglement of the state and markets has been loosely conceptualized as a process of marketization. This concept describes the insertion of markets or market forces into the state and public sector. In this paper we unpack this concept by highlighting the need to think about a range of marketization processes at play across a range of geographies.

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Recently, design-build-operate-transfer-style private-public partnerships have gained popularity both with left-wing and with right-wing governments as a means of effectively delivering large-scale transportation infrastructure projects. Proponents suggest that introducing competition and market forces into the procurement of public infrastructure can make decision making more accountable, contribute to greater technological innovation, and reduce the potential for construction-cost escalations that consistently have plagued transportation projects. However, this article shows that in the case of a new rapid-rail development in Vancouver, Canada, the private-public-partnership method of project delivery has been largely incongruent with increased accountability while failing to drive technological innovation or limit cost escalations during the planning process.