Sherratt, F and Sherratt, S (2018) PPP problems: Challenging academic compliance with economic opportunism and exploitation. In: Gorse, C and Neilson, C J (eds.) Proceedings of 34th Annual ARCOM Conference, 3-5 September 2018, Queen’s University, Belfast, UK.
Abstract
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.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | academic complicity; critical discourse; economics; PPP |
| Index terms: | public sector, developing economy, exploitation, partnership, private sector, joint venture, society, opportunism, procurement process, case study, compliance, investor, value-for-money, project delivery, construction procurement, regulation, inequality |
| Subjects: | business, data collection methods, project delivery, contractual arrangements, management, economic development, evaluation, health safety and environment, sociology, partnership management, political science, communities and social development, administrative law, industry analysis |
| Topics: | Organizational Design, Legal Issues, Ethics, Value Management, International Construction, Stakeholder Management, Procurement, Governance, Business Strategy, Health and Safety, Research Practice |
| Descriptive scope: | 3 PCE |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here