Governance amidst uncertainty: the Indian PPP experience with the Bangalore international airport

Abstract

Public Private Partnerships are attracting considerable attention in both scholarly and policy discourses. Politicians, policy makers, bankers, scholars, researchers the world over are talking about them. Industrial economies such as the USA, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada have adopted PPP arrangements to provide public services like roads, airports, education, health and water supply. Though PPPs attract widespread media attention, there is little clarity in the public mind about what is a Public Private Partnership. There is certainly no consensus about what outcomes we can expect from a partnership, or how we can execute them successfully; not just in the popular or policy discourse but even in scholarly debates on the subject. Are PPPs a passing fad, or will they evolve into a useful public policy tool? If PPPs are here to stay, we need to learn how to make them work. Our paper uses an integrative framework of Process, Partnership and Governance to explore the characteristics and issues relating to an infrastructure Public Private Partnership, and the policy processes and the institutional structures to make the PPP an effective and appropriate policy instrument in the Indian context, using the case study of the Bangalore International Airport.