PPP problems: Challenging academic compliance with economic opportunism and exploitation

PPPs are joint ventures in which the private sector works in partnership with government bodies to deliver public sector projects with the intention to deliver such projects more quickly, efficiently and with better value for money.  They are also one of the most contentious project delivery mechanisms to have been mobilised in recent decades.  Case study research clearly demonstrates the lack of realised value within many such projects, yet construction management academics continue to research ways of increasing, implementing and optimising this approach in practice, even encouraging its adoption worldwide despite growing social and political dissatisfaction.  We seek to challenge this dominant academic approach to PPPs.  We would instead question why the public sector can no longer deliver for society?  And why the only possible solution to this problem is to encourage and support an increase in private-sector investor PPP activity?  Here, we go beyond myopic construction management considerations of PPPs, and place them firmly within the neoliberal context from which they were most recently unleashed, an economically-grounded perspective enabling us to not only examine how continuing financial de-regulation has permitted the creation of the money that enables the delivery of such projects, but also the subsequent realisation of vast private-sector returns on publically-guaranteed projects.   Through this economic lens, uncritical academic compliance with a procurement process that demonstrably contributes to economic inequalities and, worse, their support and recommendation of this mechanism to more vulnerable developing economies in which the investment provision is more likely to be global than local, becomes a considerable cause for concern.  We therefore seek to confront the often unquestioned academic support of this construction procurement route, and directly challenge researchers to rethink their complicity with PPPs by revealing the economic mechanisms that lie beneath and support continuing opportunism and exploitation in practice.