The performance of private finance-based infrastructure public–private partnerships remains hotly contested, despite their global popularity. This chapter explores the meaning of PPP and the notion of PPP success, and points to multiple interpretations of both. It proposes a new conceptual model of the PPP phenomenon, including five levels of meaning: project, delivery method, policy, governance tool, and cultural context. Numerous criteria exist on which the success of PPP might be judged. These are as oriented towards politics and governance as they are towards more traditional utilitarian policy goals concerned with project delivery, or value for money (VfM). Indeed, governments have dozens of different goals in mind. Given mixed international results to date for VfM, it is posited that to the extent that infrastructure PPPs continue to show popularity, governments may well be stressing PPP success more on the basis of political and governance strengths, than utilitarian characteristics.
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Hodge et al. (2019) studied this question.