LITERATURE REVIEW
2.2 Public-Private Partnerships
2.2.2 Why: Motives, Purposes and Problems of PPPs
implications for the CBP. For example, risk shifting should be achieved in the CBP but “risk” is not financial-related but is more connected with trade compliance and security issues.
Holzer et al. thinks that partnership can contribute to public productivity. They argues “The ability to think and act outside the rigid but familiar bureaucracies box can be essential for pooling resources and improving productivity in an increasingly resource-scarce atmosphere.” While tracing the “great five ideas in American public administration,” Holzer thinks that “cooperative partnerships” actually create opportunities to enhance public productivity.
Table 2.6 Motives for Partnership Formation
Motives Comments Implications for CBP
Management reform and modernization
Through working partnership with the private sector, public managers will learn how to run programs more flexibly and efficiently.
Customs takes partnership as a key principle for Customs modernization.
Attracting private finance
By partnering, public agencies will be able to tap into private finance, enabling them to pursue projects which could not be afforded from public budgets alone.
Not a major concern for the CBP since no many cost implications will be incurred in CBP collaborative arrangement, though one major incentive is to reduce cost for trade community
Public legitimacy Participation in a partnership is seen as a good in itself—
symbolic of a pooling of talents from government, the market sector and the voluntary sector in pursuit of worthy public purposes.
One of the major motives for the CBP as Customs desires to achieve higher trade compliance through cooperation with the private sector
Risk shifting Private partners assume part of the whole of the financial risk associated with projects.
It concerns, but risk is not restricted to
“cost,” but is rather more related to supply chain security concerns or commercial fraud risks.
Table 2.6 (Continued)
Motives Comments Implications for CBP
Downsizing the public sector
PPPs may be seen by those who favor downsizing the public sector service as a way to get tasks which were formerly performed by public sector staff handed over to the staff of commercial or voluntary organizations.
Facing dual pressures imposed by increasing workloads and decreasing resources, Customs needs to allocate resources optimally to high-risk areas in their interaction with business.
Power sharing Partnerships may be seen as promoting more cooperative,
“horizontal,” less authoritarian and hierarchical relationships.
This specially concerns Customs. It is assumed that power sharing between Customs and business can improve trade compliance.
Source: Adapted from Pollit, 2003a.
According to scholars in governance, the driving force for public governance is not the need to make public sector organizations and public services more efficient (still remain important) but rather the need to solve “wicked problems” in society which cannot be tackled by public agencies acting alone and which, therefore, seem to require public agencies to be prepared to work with a wide range of other organizations in the public, private and voluntary sectors (Peters and Pierre, 1998;
Stoker, 1998).
The purposes of PPPs can be seen from the perspectives of policy and resource allocation. Bovaird (2004) identifies that PPPs can fulfill below purposes across policy process: policy design and planning, policy coordination, policy monitoring, policy evaluation and review, policy implementation and service delivery, resource mobilization and management. Under this observation, the CBP can have every bearing on these facets, but more on policy implementation and resource mobilization.
Do PPPs really achieve their intended outcomes? Answers are mixed. The recent literature has critically questioned whether PPPs are not an all-good panacea to address social problems and evidence for its ideological proclamations is not strong.
Rosenau (1999), while analyzing the public-private policy partnerships implemented in the U.S., provide a comprehensive critique on the weakness of policy PPPs:
Partnering my, at least in the short term, decrease costs, if cost and efficiency are defined narrowly and externalities are discounted.
Despite this advantage, public-private policy partnerships have substantial problems. They do not exhibit superior performance in the criteria of equity, access and democracy. Rather than reduce regulation, public-private policy partners appear to increase it. Regarding accountability, public partners are the providers of last resort, although this could change if private partners gain more experience and partnering moves beyond minimalist forms to more fully developed policy partnerships.
Therefore, he urges that “public-private policy partnerships are imperfect and in need of refinement and reform.” Hall (1999), while examining the role of coordination, collaboration, and the partnerships in tourism management regarding the Australian experience, argues that the “predominance of narrow corporatist notion of collaboration and partnership in network structures may serve to undermine notions of the development of the social capital required for sustainable development.”
More recent literature discovered a “darker side” of PPPs. Selsky and Parker (2005) concluded that the evaluation of the implementation and outcomes of PPPs is generally inadequate. Agranoff demythologizes collaborative networks and identifies lessons for public mangers; for example, networks have their collaborative costs. Jung and Osborne (2008) argues that “[it] is widely assumed that partnership arrangements are a panacea for addressing the complex and interdependent problems faced by public services… however, partnership’s true benefits are uncertain.” They attribute such deficiency of PPPs to three causes: first, arguments of PPPs are ideologically tainted; second, the partnership concept lacks clarity; and subsequently, assessment is problematic.
Having briefly reviewed the strengths and weaknesses of PPPs, feasible inference is that, as a new and emerging genre of PPPs, the CBP may not be immune
to the above problems. Therefore, rational considerations should be used to design and implement CBP arrangements.