ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the cultural problem of PPPs. The PPP policy agenda in international development seeks to juxtapose actors with distinct rationales and institutional logics, with the ambition to create synergy between them. In practice, however, the intentional encounter between public and private actors produces interface situations that also amplify the actors’ distinctiveness and thus the cultural problem of PPPs. The chapter draws on data collection in the World Bank and a case study in Ethiopia of a PPP development project involving an NGO and a multinational corporation. This shows the practical renderings and effects of the culture problem, here causing the private actor to withdraw from the partnership and their joint project. Thus, what was meant as a project of synergy becomes a publicly funded proxy and subsidy of private interests. At the general level, the chapter shows how the PPP agenda compels categorisation as either public or private while at the same time it seeks to merge these differences. As such, the interface dynamics and cultural problem are not only produced by the PPP agenda but may also undermine it.
