Paper short abstract:

Public-private partnerships are central to current development policy and represent a new frontier of privatization. Drawing on Nigerian examples, the continuities and discontinuities between PPPs and older forms of privatization help us rethink the lines between public/private and state/market.

Paper long abstract:

By the mid-2000s, the World Bank’s two decade “privatization experiment” was finally drawing to a close (Fine 2007). With the UNDP decisively declaring the experiment “failed” (McKinley 2007), the World Bank itself conceded that, at the very least, the one-size-fits-all model of transferring public assets and utilities to private ownership would have to be revised. Yet out of the ashes of ‘hard-core’ privatization arose a new paradigm of private sector-led development: public-private partnerships (PPPs) (Bayliss and Waeyenberge 2018). PPPs have since come to dominate the development landscape: the SDGs target PPPs and they are central to the World Bank’s pandemic response (Dimakou et al. 2020; Gideon and Unterhalter 2020). Denoting a wide variety of arrangements, a common thread among PPPs is that full ownership is rarely transferred. Rather than the state ‘divesting’ from public services, it is enlisted to facilitate the participation of private actors, whether through ‘de-risking’, the creation of bankable products or the guarantee of revenue streams (Shaoul et al. 2012; Gabor 2020).

If PPPs are the new frontier of privatisation, then the empirical study of PPPs and the discourses that surround them allows us to trace how privatisation has evolved over the last two decades. This paper draws on original research on state-level PPPs in Nigeria to highlight the continuities and discontinuities between older and newer paradigms of privatization. It argues that we need to update our understanding of public/private and state/market to reflect changes in modern capitalism and the state.