ABSTRACT
At first glance, public-private partnerships appear to be conceptually hard to apply in a region that does not lend itself readily to a Western analytical perspective. The diffusion of policy ideas and innovations assumes receptive environments. Therefore this chapter seeks to provide an understanding of the context of social policy within the region, a context which has profound implications for the development of public-private partnerships. Although it is difficult to generalize about the region, the central argument here is that the concept of public-private partnerships has developed within the context of fundamental structural changes to the welfare state in Western liberal democracies. In the West, there has been a growing consensus about the legitimacy of encouraging the private and the non-profit sectors to provide public services. Lowndes and Skelcher (1998) ascribe the development of partnerships in the UK to growing restraints on public resources, the organizational fragmentation brought about by the New Public Management, persistent social problems that demanded a partnership approach and strategies to democratize grass-roots decision making. As this chapter seeks to demonstrate, the absence or fragility of these determinants in East Asia means that we cannot assume that is inevitable that public-private partnership will become an automatic feature of governance. After an assessment of the prospects for partnerships in relation to the impact of economic globalization, the demands of the state and the influence of culture, the chapter will evaluate the uneven scope for public-private partnerships by reviewing policy change in the countries that constitute the region. For the purposes of this chapter, East Asia refers to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the PRC (formerly Hong Kong), the Republic of China on Taiwan (Taiwan), South Korea and Japan. If we expand the categorization to that of ‘Confucianist’ Asia, Singapore is also included (Tu 1996). Singapore also shares many socio-economic features with the rest of East Asia.
