ABSTRACT

The terms and applications of PPPs today have become a mainstay of governance and public service delivery throughout the world. PPPs have become a clearer practice as the NPM also became better defined in its role of merging private sectors into the public realm. This is a process that marks modern public administration since the Progressive Era beginning in the 1880s. NPM is notable for efforts to merge business administration with public administration. But, as these things go, the reverse also occurred and today we see in business education and practice an infusion of new avenues of non-profit and public management. This was possible chiefly because public administration grew and developed into a true profession after WWII. This followed the emergence of a modern, consumer-driven middle class needing unforetold “infrastructure” to sustain it, and a “class” with professional ambitions. To this extent, successful governments throughout the world understand the need to anchor themselves in the varied social/economic infrastructures required of modern civilizations now including a digital and virtual reality and unprecedented communications abilities that in themselves describe modern civilization. Infrastructure no longer refers only to physical foundations or transportation, but the backbone and sustainable agreements of any social human endeavor. Infrastructure is the correct province of government, and governance is our access to the management of such agreements, as they arrive, develop, and are sustained.