Contracting for Public Value

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) play an increasingly central role in the delivery of public services worldwide, promoting long-term institutional cooperation through multisector partnerships. If well-structured and managed, PPPs offer the opportunity to expand public service capacities while sharing financial and operational risks and responsibilities with private partners. Yet many PPPs experience conflict and fail, squandering public resources and falling short in serving the public interest. Contracting for Public Value extensively analyzes the contractual arrangements and relationships that serve as the scaffolding for PPPs, and how they can be designed, developed, and managed to promote more effective, accountable, and sustainable partnerships for public services delivery. The book focuses on two in-depth case studies of complex, multiactor PPPs--one in the United States and one in the United Kingdom--that employed outcomes-based contracts in arranging for service provision to vulnerable populations. Drawing on multiple theoretical models, the book characterizes the organizational structures, contractual features, and exchange relationships among the respective sets of PPP partners. It presents theory-informed, comparative analyses using rich case-study data to illuminate how the formal and relational contract features structured the collaborations and either supported or impeded the success of the PPPs. The analysis generates new knowledge that challenges the predominance of the traditional formal contract that has governed most PPPs and introduces new thinking about relational contracting and systems change to enhance the success of PPPs. Practitioners will derive specific, original guidance and examples from this book on how to champion public value in designing and executing a PPP contract, center relationship building and fortify PPPs with effective institutional and accountability mechanisms, and sustain long-term, public-private collaboration.