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.