ABSTRACT

The 1990s has seen the establishment of public-private partnerships (PPPs) as a key tool of public policy across the world. Not only have they become seen as a cost-efficient and effective mechanism for the implementation of public policy across a range of policy agendas, they have also been articulated as bringing significant benefits in their own right-particularly in terms of developing socially inclusive communities. Examples of both kinds of PPPs include:

• in the UK, PPPs are a cornerstone of the developing stakeholder society of the ‘New Labour’ government and an essential tool to implement significant social policies, such as the regeneration of urban areas (the Single Regeneration Budget) and the struggle to combat youth unemployment (the welfare to work programme) (Falconer and Ross 1998);

• in Hungary, PPPs are being seen as a means through which both to restructure the provision of public services to meet social needs and to develop a civil society in the aftermath of the communist regimes (Osborne and Kaposvari 1997, 1998);

• within European Union policy development, PPPs are an essential integrative mechanism both to combat social exclusion and to enhance local-community development (Jones 1998); and

• in the US, PPPs are central to national and state-government initiatives to regenerate local urban communities, as well as often arising out of communityled attempts to deal with the crisis of government in American communities (Aspen Institute 1997; Podziba 1998).