Beyond typologies. What is a Public Private Partnership?

This chapter seeks to engage with the issues related public private partnerships (PPPs) to explicitly by unpacking different typologies that have been used to categorise PPPs. It develops a criticism of these typologies, despite their benevolent and often critical intent, arguing that they tend to draw attention away from the underlying shared features of PPP arrangements, that become obfuscated as differences in concrete arrangements are emphasised. The chapter considers both general PPP typologies as well as typologies that have been developed specifically for the health and education sectors, as two key infrastructure sectors. It focuses on efforts at categorising PPPs along particular typologies suggesting that these fail to give an adequate picture of the PPP phenomenon. In essence, it is argued that, while these typologies capture differences in PPPs in their own ways, and hence draw attention to different dimensions of concrete PPP arrangements, they tend to detract from the fundamental features shared across PPP arrangements