Effectiveness of Public Private Partnerships: A Systematic Literature Review

Questions about the ‘effectiveness’ of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have been raised for quite some time now. Although implementation and performance problems are given some attention while carrying out systematic literature review regarding PPPs, there is no systematic literature review available to the best of our knowledge that analyses/reviews the ways in which the effectiveness of PPPs is measured. This review of 107 articles intends to fill this gap by reviewing the peer-reviewed articles/papers published during the years 2000-2016. It particularly investigated three areas including (a) the ways in which the effectiveness of PPPs is defined, (b) methods used by the researchers to measure the effectiveness of PPPs, and (c) theories/perspectives explaining the effectiveness of PPPs. The results indicated that the effectiveness of PPPs is not clearly defined in the existing literature. Moreover, there is no consensus on what counts as an effective PPP. Regarding the methods of measurement, the overwhelming majority of researchers focused only on the identification of factors as opposed to the actual measurement of effectiveness. With respect to theoretical perspectives, governance theories were used in most cases. Based on the findings of this systematic literature review, it is recommended in the current research to use six broad categories of methods/factors identified as a starting point to measure the effectiveness of PPPs.