The politics of public–private partnerships: state–capital relations and spatial fixes in Indonesia and the Philippines

The literature on public–private partnerships (PPPs) often portrays infrastructure construction as a depoliticized and technocratic exercise about efficiency and cost-effectiveness. In contrast to these works, we contend the political and economic elites along with their transnational allies – the congruence of state–capital – recycle PPPs in constructing their spatial fixes, guaranteeing profits and passing risks from the private sector bidder onto the public as a whole. We suggest that PPPs lie within the intertwining processes of ‘Development’ and ‘development’, which are articulations of neoliberalism in its latest and most sophisticated iteration. Across different regimes, PPPs’ processes and mechanisms reflect various governance structures and hybrid forms of state–capital relations. Examining Indonesia and the Philippines, we empirically demonstrate how state–capital forces reproduced PPPs to simultaneously accommodate degrees of state intervention and the private sector’s desire for a spatial fix. We illustrate that administrations withinboth countries have sought to rebuild the PPPs as institutions of technocratic fixation while obscuring the political underpinnings of the risk appropriation – transforming the state’s responsibility in infrastructure and foregrounding spatial fixes for capital. The article concludes with a call to unpack the variegated character of PPPs.