Paper short abstract:

Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) have been launched as an alternative to reduce the debt burdens of African countries towards China, and as a way of rehabilitating the often bad images of Chinese enterprises. This paper looks at the use of PPPs involving Chinese actors in Ethiopia.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the use of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) involving Chinese actors in Ethiopia. PPPs have been launched as an alternative to reduce the debt burdens of African countries towards China, and as a way of rehabilitating the often bad image of Chinese enterprises as brutely profit maximizing, socially unconscious, and environmentally destructive. This paper explores the sectors which PPPs are implemented, the rationale behind the PPPs, and whether they succeed in rehabilitating the image of Chinese enterprises.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will provide ethnographic data from my recent fieldwork on Special Economic Zones (SEZs)/Industrial Park s(IPs) in Ethiopia.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will provide ethnographic data from my recent fieldwork on Special Economic Zones (SEZs)/Industrial Park s(IPs) in Ethiopia. Traditionally, Ethiopia’s system of government has entailed a significant role of the state in regulating the market as well as a significant undermining of private actors. Since around 2010 however, the government has opted for the development of the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) as a model for rapid economic growth. Aided and inspired by Chinese and other South Asian states, this is a strategy that aims to attract foreign direct investment by creating designated physical areas with ready-made factories and working infrastructure that international companies can easily move their production to. Interestingly, within these Zones, the rules of business are different from the rest of the country. Companies operating within the Zones are often exempt from paying taxes, customs duties and operate in a different regulatory environment than the rest of the national territory. Within the Zones, international corporations therefore operate in an environment of exception, and perhaps even in ways that indicates a form of territorialized authority. How public and private actors operate and navigate the development and operation of the IPs in Ethiopia therefore provides an interesting and potentially fruitful case of the evolving and unstable boundary between the public and private spheres in processes of economic development.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses a key channel of financialisation of healthcare, Public-Private Partnerships. It pays particular attention to the World Bank’s role in promoting PPPs, which are being presented as an apt strategy to overcome an acute funding gap to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1950s, most social security and human rights declarations make reference to the right to health, maintaining that physical and mental well-being are essential for human progress. Alongside the necessity to pay close attention to the social determinants of health and related social service delivery systems, the provision of healthcare is at the heart of realising the right to health. More recently, though, an ambition to deliver comprehensive healthcare to all citizens via public provisioning systems has been replaced by calls for Universal Health Coverage (UHC). The promotion of UHC entails a lesser focus on how healthcare services are provided and financed compared to earlier ambitions to universal and publicly funded and provided healthcare. Notably, the World Bank is at the forefront of encouraging an increased role for the private sector in national healthcare systems. Crucially, however, the World Bank’s efforts are no longer only targeted at increasing the role of non-financial private actors in healthcare. Rather, national healthcare systems are becoming more and more exposed to globalised finance. While there are a range of channels via which the financialisation of healthcare manifests, this paper discusses a more and more commonly employed strategy to increase the involvement of financial private actors in healthcare, namely Public-Private-Partnerships (PPPs). It pays particular attention to the World Bank’s role in promoting the PPP approach, which is being presented as an apt strategy to overcome an acute funding gap to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, despite an absence of evidence of their advantageousness.

Paper short abstract:

Large-scale mining projects may have adverse impacts on public health. This paper applies Q-methodology to identify policy preferences of different stakeholders from government, the private sector and civil society for regulating public health in large-scale mining projects in Burkina Faso.

Paper long abstract:

Large-scale resource extraction may lead to significant negative externalities on the environment, social well-being and public health of affected communities. Negative environmental impacts of extractive projects are regularly considered through mandatory environmental impact assessments, however, public health impacts frequently remain unaddressed due to a lack of legal requirements, particularly in Africa. While policy instruments are available to mitigate negative externalities on public health - the most eminent being the Health Impact Assessment (HIA) – the instrument of HIA has not yet been established. We use Q-methodology to identify policy preferences of government, private sector and civil society stakeholders for regulating public health in large-scale mining projects in Burkina Faso. We identify two broader stakeholder perspectives that reveal an overarching consensus on the need to address health impacts of mining projects. Both perspectives reject industry self-regulation and broadly agree on introducing HIA as a regulatory instrument, but also point to different priorities among stakeholders. We develop a conceptual framework to map stakeholders’ shared and divergent policy preferences and focal points. The findings can help to initiate a policy dialogue on safeguarding public health in large-scale mining and may provide guidance for policy makers to implement public health policy reform.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on research conducted on Norwegian funded development projects in Ethiopia, this paper seeks to rethink public-private-partnerships (PPP) through the virus metaphor. This framing disrupts the human-centered perspective and rationalistic biases that dominate the existing scholarship.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on research conducted on Norwegian funded development projects in Ethiopia, this paper seeks to rethink public-private-partnerships (PPP) through the virus metaphor. To use biological metaphors to make sense of social phenomena is delicate and ambiguous. This is particularly the case when the metaphor is the virus – an entity that is associated with destruction and death. As a growing body of literature in evolutionary biology has shown, viruses are, however, not solely pathological and lethal. In addition to being everywhere, viruses are key contributors to the evolution of cells. This does not mean that the virus is a self-contained, living entity. To become a living, infectious virus, it must establish a set of relations with a permissive cell. The close co-existence and interdependency between viruses and their host cells can be used to rethink state/non-state relationships, as it collapses the distinction between the public and the private as two independent and easily detectable entities. More specifically I suggest that PPP can best be approached as a viral assemblage – a messy, fluid, socio-technical process and constellation of ideas, human and non-human actors, unpredictable events, and relations that have contagious and affective qualities. This theoretical framing disrupts the one-sided human-centered perspective and rationalistic biases that dominate the existing scholarship, allowing for the recognition of public-private partnerships as complex, unstable, and affective relationships. It also facilitates a movement away from the normative portrayal of PPPs as either fundamentally instrumental and good, or destructive and bad.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the strategic partnership between a multinational, private mining company, a publicly funded NGO and a public college in Ethiopia, illustrating how the involvement of private actors to development aid influences established development discourses, practices, and policies.

Paper long abstract:

Involving private actors into public development initiatives has been raised as paramount to effectively financing and implementing the audacious Sustainable Development Goals. In Norwegian development policy this is operationalised through a strategic partnership programme that seeks to stimulate collaboration between private actors and publicly funded development agencies. This paper explores the formation of one such strategic partnership project in Ethiopia.

Empirically, the paper explores the strategic partnership between a miniscule vocational training college in Afar, Ethiopia, a small Norwegian NGO, and a huge private, multinational fertilizer company. The latter is on the verge of establishing a gigantic potash mine, but needs skilled labour to build and run the mine. It thus enters a strategic partnership with a local, public institution and a publicly financed, Norwegian NGO to cooperate in offering training to local youth. As the project unfolds, the actors’ different material resources, diverging interests and mandates crystalise – and the private actor fears the low college and training standards will deter its investors and shareholders. The private actor gradually withdraws, erecting firewalls vis-à-vis its own mining project to preserve its reputation, thus making the publicly funded development project a proxy for private interests.

Analysed in terms of ‘interface’, the paper explores the various encounters between public and private actors with different rationales and mandates that prove hard to reconcile in practice, thus illustrating how the involvement of private actors to development aid influences established development discourses, practices, and policies.

Paper short abstract:

Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) are leading the way in mobilizing private capital for international development purposes. In the field offices of DFIs, investment managers hired in-country are simultaneously challenging the signature attributes of "local" development professionals.

Paper long abstract:

In the world of international aid, a new group of locally recruited development practitioners is emerging. They work neither for international NGOs nor for donor state agencies, but for Development Finance Institutions (DFIs). DFIs are profit-making banks that invest in commercial businesses in the global South, increasingly using tax-funded aid money. With Agenda 2030’s call to seek funding for the SDGs in private capital, European bilateral DFIs have tripled in size in recent years. This paper posits that locally recruited investment managers working for DFI field offices in aid recipient countries challenge three of the signature attributes commonly assigned to local development professionals. Firstly, their ‘local’ expertise does not contrast with or preclude international expertise, but rather overlaps with it. Secondly, their formal authority and career ladders are not restricted to technical or support positions—many DFI field offices are headed by local employees. Thirdly, they rarely face job insecurity given their competitive qualifications and permanent, rather than short-term, employment contracts. This suggests that DFIs, often used to showcase the private sector’s growing role as a “development partner”, represent a break with the structural inequalities between donor and recipient country staff that are otherwise integral to the (public and non-profit) international development industry. However, a closer look indicates the displacement, rather than elimination, of such global North–South hierarchies. Fieldwork among investment managers in Nairobi shows that, in DFIs, such inequalities are found less within the walls of field offices and more in the relationship between those offices and headquarters.

Paper short abstract:

This paper uses ownershipping as an analytical tool for grasping public – private partnership in development processes. It captures taxonomical activities and practices relating to how actors representing various systems and rationalities establish common platforms and language.

Paper long abstract:

From the development buzzword “ownership,” I have coined the term ownershipping as an analytical tool for grasping public – private partnership in development processes in Ethiopia. I use it to capture bureaucratic or taxonomical activities and practices relating to how actors representing various systems and rationalities establish common platforms and an institutional language. The shipping aspect points to how concepts travel and new entities come to own them. This makes it possible to capture the making of bureaucratic taxonomies, the making of commitment to policies, the creation of responsibility for processes and how various subjectivities in this process become connected and disconnected in development processes geared towards public – private partnership. Ownershipping serves to explicate how various meanings of words, rationalities and practices are shipped up and down, back and forth within a global hierarchy through various individual efforts to connect and make sense locally. It provides a good point of entry for understanding variations in how people in this business see the world and make connections and disconnections. The paper further describes how ownershipping takes the form of pick and choose activities and as a catching-up phenomenon between actors, systems and elements pertaining to development processes in Ethiopia. The paper combines ownershipping with the term catching up as a specific characteristic of entrepreneurship and as a mechanism of public – private partnerships.

Paper short abstract:

To bridge the huge infrastructure gap, African cities must explore several financing options - sometimes very complex instruments. Therefore, the research seeks to critique solutions perceived as green, resilient, inclusive, fair, and equal within the sub-Saharan African context

Paper long abstract:

Over the years, the financial sector has evolved to occupy a central role in the world economies by expanding in scope and remuneration - a phenomenon called financialisation. As the African continent continues to grapple with the effects of globalisation, technological advances, for example, blockchains & digital currencies, and the emergence of new economic powers, the financial landscape is likely to become increasingly complex. The critical issue is that due to the growing population in urban centres, African cities are facing an increasing infrastructure gap estimated to reach US$68 billion annually by 2040. However, there is a constraint in the government's ability to fund, and it is expected that 30% of the required funding will be provided by private investment. To bridge this gap, African cities must explore several financing options, all in search of the most sustainable approach for an economy, including public-private partnerships, concessional financing, and innovative financing mechanisms – “the very complex instruments.” Developing sustainable solutions require transitions with trade-offs that must be thoroughly considered, and the road to sustainability comes with serious challenges. The research seeks to critique solutions perceived as green, resilient, inclusive, fair, and equal and enquire if “infrastructure” is a luxury, consumption, public or common good within the sub-Saharan-African context. Through a coproduction design with combined analysis and participatory engagement (bottom-up approach) of all relevant stakeholders – in a public, private, people-first partnership (PPPP*), the proposed research aims to develop sustainable financing frameworks to retrofit and build climate–resilient transport infrastructure.

PPPP- Public-Private-People-first Partnerships