Public-private partnerships: a comparative study of new public management and stakeholder participation in the UK and Spain

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) involve the collaboration between the public sector providers of goods and, more specifically, services and private sector counterparts. The arrangement is one component of a wider initiative which has been taken place across both developing and developed economies during the past decade, this being the process of public sector reform or 'New Public Management' (NPM). The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the practice of PPP in Spain with that in the UK. Our analysis questions the assumption that the standardisation of PPP is necessarily the correct strategy in highly democratically devolved states. We also examine which approach to PPP – the Spanish-Continental 'network' approach or the Anglophone contract-based model – presents the best way forward for the evolution of the PPP in market-based economies.