Public-Private Policy Partnerships

Partnerships between the public and private sectors to fulfill public functions are on the increase at every level of government. In the United States and Canada they currently operate in most policy areas, and in the U.S. trial programs are planned by the Internal Revenue Service, the Census Bureau, and the Social Security Administration. Partnerships represent the second generation of efforts to bring competitive market discipline to bear on government operations. Unlike the first generation of privatizing efforts, partnering involves sharing both responsibility and financial risk. In the best situations, the strengths of each sector maximize overall performance. In these cases, partnering institutionalizes collaborative arrangements in which the differences between the sectors become blurred. This is the first book to evaluate public-private partnerships in a broad range of policy areas. The chapters focus on education, health care and health policy, welfare, prisons, the criminal justice system, environmental policy, energy policy, technology research and development, and transportation. The contributors come from a number of fields, including political science, education, law, economics, and public health. They merge experiential and social-scientific findings to examine how partnerships perform, to identify the conditions in which they work best, and to determine when they might be expected to fail.

Contributors
Ronald J. Daniels, James A. Dunn, Jr., Sheldon Kamieniecki, Harry M. Levin, Stephen H. Linder, Nicholas P. Lovrich, Jr., Mark Carl Rom, Pauline Vaillancourt Rosenau, Walter A. Rosenbaum, Anne Larason Schneider, David Shafie, Julie Silvers, Michael S. Sparer, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Michael J. Trebilcock, Scott J. Wallsten

"From private prisons to high technology, this book cuts through boththe hype and hostility regarding privatization and public-privatepartnerships. It provides instead solid policy analysis regarding abroad range of contemporary initiatives." Robert Paehlke, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario This book provides an excellent overview of fresh experiments in public-private partnerships from leading experts in several fields. It will be useful for planners, administrators, and students in the U.S. and abroad. The conceptual chapters offer lucid typologies for understanding dimensions and kinds of parnterships, and the critical chapters assemble evidence that partnerships are no panacea--trade-offs exist at every turn that need to be anticipated. A model of evidence-based policy analysis. -- Donald W. Light, Professor of Comparative Health Care Systems, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey This book could not have come at a better time! Policy scholars and decision-makers are trying hard to make sense of events against a fast-moving kaleidoscope of societal change. Rosenau's book promises to become a definitive guide for analyzing it. -- Eugene B. Gallagher, Professor of Medical Sociology, University of Kentucky