Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

Public–private partnerships have been widely identified as key drivers of innovation in large public infrastructure projects such as hospitals, courthouses, bridges, highways, and transit lines. Yet to date, there is little empirical evidence documenting how much or what types of innovation are realized through the public–private partnership procurement process. Based on an examination of public–private partnership project delivery in Ontario, Canada over the past decade, this study shows that the innovations realized through the public–private partnership process tend to be a series of design, construction method, and material selection choices primarily aimed at lowering project cost and risk. Conversely, more revolutionary innovations in terms of iconic architecture or substantial rethinking of the approach to public service delivery are not typically achieved through the public–private partnership process. The paper concludes by reflecting on the meaning of innovation in the infrastructure sector, and identifies the specific public–private partnership procurement processes that incentivize cost-saving ingenuities over more transformational innovations.

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are understood as collaborative devices that can be used to achieve both efficiency and innovation. For this potential to be realized, however, some significant obstacles to effective collaboration must be overcome, such as the cognitive distance that often separates public and private agents. In order to deepen our understanding of the collaboration problem, this article assesses the size and characteristics of cognitive distance by looking at agents operating in the construction industry in Italy and Slovenia. Our analysis detects the presence of different types of cognitive distance in different socio-economic contexts, suggesting that cognitive distance is not simply the outcome of individual intentionality but also of social context. We argue that there is constructive room for policies supporting the efficiency and diffusion of PPPs that will facilitate the emergence of context-specific intermediaries to smooth the progress of collaborative work.

The value of public–private partnerships has typically been sought in financial and budgetary benefits. In both research and practice, important aspects of nonfinancial value have remained under the radar. This article discusses four “white raven” public–private partnerships that have shown rather atypical results in terms of their physical outcomes—design, contextual fit, and multifunctionality. We argue that despite the increasing role of private sector actors, public sector clients fulfill a key role in delivering value. A strong sense of ambition and vision, in combination with a solid coordination on the part of the client, helps deliver projects that go beyond mere financial perks and deliver true social value. These elements have largely been overlooked in previous research, which has often focused on financial, legal, political, and managerial capacities of government actors.

Public works often suffer from long durations and time escalations, which entail the dissatisfaction of collective needs. Using micro-level data on the works recently procured by the municipalities of a large Italian region, we analyse delay incurrence and the subsequent time-to-completion of works. For this purpose, we rely on a split-population duration model. Our findings show that appropriate levels of expertise and experience – which are often believed to be lacking in municipalities – have a role in speeding up works' executions. The lack of experience is actually an issue that requires appropriate policy remedies, in that it brings to higher delay probability and longer delay durations. The same applies to municipalities that resort to late payments in response to budget constraints.

Public procurement is frequently touted as a means of promoting innovation at the sub-national level, but the underlying mechanisms through which this is supposed to work are seldom articulated. In particular, while the relevance of social interaction for innovation is offered as a key rationale for the use of public procurement for innovation, there is little discussion of its corresponding spatial dimensions. This paper contributes to this debate by advancing our understanding of the spatial aspects of public procurement for innovation and thus of the scope for using public procurement to achieve regional innovation policy goals. We connect the public procurement for innovation literature with the literatures on innovation-driven regional development around the notion of ‘conversations’ to capture the spatial and social aspects of interactions relevant for public procurement for innovation. Different forms of spatial anchoring of procurement are explored, presenting different challenges and opportunities for regions. We provide illustrative examples for each type, from which suggestions are derived for promoting place-based ‘innovation-friendly’ procurement.

Many communities face increasing vulnerability to the risks posed by natural hazards, such as floods, wildfires, and hurricanes. In the public policy literature, natural disasters can garner the attention of the public and elites and therefore become focusing events that can open windows of opportunity for policy change to reduce community vulnerability to local risks. Past decisions by governments to ignore or leave hazard risks unaddressed can also be viewed as policy failures when the disaster results in loss of life or property. Whether risk from such disasters persists depends on whether governments learn and adapt based on their experiences with disasters. This research examines two catastrophic wildfires that occurred in Colorado, USA, to determine how policy narratives about these events may influence policy change. Media coverage is analyzed as a measure of the policy narratives within communities. Findings indicate that patterns of policy narrative construction in these cases may preclude public dialog focused on mitigating wildfire risk through policy change.

This article examines the link between government decentralization and domestic terrorism in 65 countries over the period 1976–2009. The results show the existence of a U-shaped relationship between fiscal devolution and the number of domestic terror attacks. This implies that fiscal decentralization first contributes to reducing domestic terrorist activity. However, beyond a certain threshold level, the relationship becomes positive, indicating that the transfer of fiscal power to subnational governments increases the incidence of domestic terrorism. Furthermore, our findings also reveal that the number of domestic terror attacks is higher in those countries in which subnational governments are characterized by greater levels of political autonomy. These results are obtained after controlling for a number of factors that could plausibly be correlated with both the incidence of domestic terrorism and government decentralization, such as the level of economic development, country size, the extent of civil liberties and democracy, the degree of trade openness, or geographical features.

The study is framed by EU renewable energy policy mobility and evaluates six German state-designated Bioenergy Regions and their role in policy performance processes. Based on in-depth interviews with Bioenergy Region personnel it displays aspects that shape the rationalities of actors and (re)produces policy translation and implementation. The cases are framed by a concept of translation loops and display the regions as relational assemblages that shape processes of policy mutation and influence the performance of policy aims. The paper shows how translation processes based on the socio-spatial relations of the involved entities affect initial policy aims and their implementations, particularly in regard to the prioritisation of economic aspects over sustainability. It further stresses the problem of insular approaches in bioenergy development that hinder joint approaches and problematises the questionable consequences of rationalist-linear based best-practice examples utilised in policy adjustment processes.

When tackling the undeclared economy, an emergent literature has called for the conventional rational economic actor approach (which uses deterrents to ensure that the costs of undeclared work outweigh the benefits) to be replaced or complemented by a social actor approach which focuses upon improving tax morale. Evaluating the validity of doing so using 27,563 face-to-face interviews conducted in 2013 across Europe, multilevel logistic regression analysis reveals that both approaches significantly reduce participation in undeclared work. When tax morale is high, however, deterrence measures have little impact on reducing the probability of participation in undeclared work and it is only when tax morale is low that raising the level of deterrents has greater impacts, with increasing the perceived risks of detection in such contexts leading to higher reductions in participation in undeclared work than increasing the perceived punishments. The paper concludes by calling for more nuanced context-bound policy approaches.