Building bridges: Unraveling the missing links between Public-Private Partnerships and sustainable development

Although there is increasing agreement that Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) contribute significantly to sustainable development, the intersection between the PPP body of knowledge and sustainability remains underdeveloped. This study adopts the Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) and their sustainable targets as means to assess the intensity of the link between the PPP literature and sustainability. Findings show that the thematic keywords in the PPP literature are multidimensionally related to sustainability through 16 out of the 17 SDGs. However, the intensity of this relationship is heterogenous: while eleven SDGs were related to less than 5% of the topics, only four SDGs (i.e., 8, 9, 16, and 17) demonstrated a strong relationship with PPPs, representing 51 out of the 169 sustainability targets. Moreover, 19 sustainability targets within these four SDGs were found to be the most representative according to their connection with the studied PPP topics, underlining high interdependencies between the PPP field and the three sustainability dimensions (society, environment, and economy). Overall, this study establishes a foundation for future studies on sustainability in PPPs by proposing three research avenues associated with social, environmental, and economic perspectives: (1) exposing the life-cycle relations between sources of payment, financing conditions, and costs of PPPs. (2) examining the most relevant challenges in achieving social legitimacy of PPP programs in developing countries. (3) providing a multidimensional empirical analysis of the effectiveness of environmental assessment tools for PPP projects.