A Comparative Institutional Evaluation of Public-Private Partnerships in Dutch Urban Land-use and Revitalisation Projects

Abstract

In the spirit of the devolution of public policy, we have recently witnessed an increasing popularity of decentralised forms of decision-making in urban land-use policy, in which both local (or regional) authorities and the private sector play a more prominent joint role in the preparation and implementation of urban development projects. The paper describes the pathway to a more institutional multi-actor mode of urban land-use and revitalisation projects within the framework of deregulated land markets and maps out various relevant aspects of competitive land use. In particular, an attempt is made to identify the crucial `drivers' of this complex decision-making process in an urban context, against the background of revitalisation objectives for modern cities. The literature suggests, in particular, that the institutional constellation, the financial viability and the presence of spatial externalities may act as critical factors for public-private partnerships. This proposition is tested in the paper by means of a comparative study on nine carefully selected urban development projects—more specifically, nine types of public-private partnerships—in The Netherlands. After the design of a systematic database on these projects, a particular type of qualitative fuzzy classification analysis originating from artificial intelligence, known as rough set analysis, is deployed to assess and identify the most important factors that are responsible for successes and failures of recent development plans in Dutch cities. This approach allows us to pinpoint the most critical policy variables.