Contextual recipes for adopting private control and trust in public–private partnership governance

Abstract

In governing public–private partnerships (PPPs), transferring control rights to the private sectors and building trust among partners are recognized as solutions to improve efficiency and adaptability. However, what contexts would fit into the adoption of these solutions remains unclear. Building on the relevant literature on project attributes and project environments, this article divides the context into several crucial factors: asset specificity, project publicness, institutional completeness, market maturity, and regulatory quality. A fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was conducted on 1378 PPP projects in developing countries to examine the contexts that support the outcomes of private control and trust. Six causal paths created by a mix of contextual conditions are found to be sufficient for the outcomes, to which certain factors make unique contributions. Knowledge of these paths and context configurations can help to match the context to the considered governance solutions, thereby contributing to successful PPP governance.

How does policy attention affect e-government performance? The role of resource allocation and public–private collaboration

“…Our finding is inconsistent with previous studies showing a positive effect of neighboring pressure on e-government performance (Lee et al, 2011; Fan et al, 2019; Pan and Fan, 2023). The finding suggests that the government attaches more importance to work related to its own interests (Wang, 2016; Tan et al, 2022). When prefectural e-government performance is the benchmark in the province, reputation can be improved and the corresponding rewards can be obtained, which will further stimulate local governments to allocate resources.…”

“…Prefectural governments have sufficient equivalent samples to allow reasonable comparability (Hu et al, 2012). Moreover, prefectural governments can flexibly choose diversified practices in line with local development, thereby playing a crucial role in Chinese reform (Wang, 2016). Hence, we focused on prefectural governments to collect data from various sources, finally retaining a sample of 1991 observations after eliminating abnormal values.…”

“…In PPC projects, governments may also need to delegate some authority if they are to gain private sector support. At the same time, the private sector with large-scale investment also hopes to participate in the construction of government projects to a greater extent (Zheng et al, 2022), so as to form the optimal power structure and maximize the total surplus (Song et al, 2022). Specifically, in implementing e-government projects, higher PPC may improve economic sustainability (Sharma, 2007), which thus might benefit from private investments to facilitate the establishment of digital infrastructures and modify existing work routines.…”

“…In the absence of detailed data on PPC, this perceptual measure can be a useful proxy, but objective assessments remain lacking. Recently, Song et al (2022) used the World Bank database to measure the depth of private participation in PPC projects on a scale of 1-12. As an important organizational arrangement, the depth of private participation reflects enterprises' initiatives in promoting government projects (Song et al, 2022;Picazo-Vela et al, 2018).…”

“…However, previous studies generally ignored the fact that financial and human resource allocation is passive without occurring in a vacuum, which needs to be guided by the external environment or policy attention to overcome the chaotic state of resource allocation. Specifically, external economic and political factors may influence resource allocation decisions (Wang, 2016; Gomes et al, 2022). The increased attention to issues will weaken or eliminate the negative influence of previous budget expenditure on the current year's expenditure (Baekgaard et al, 2019).…”