介绍:
But on a practical level, I go into a lot of detail about the discourse of changing over time. I think original proponents of public private partnerships, you can describe them in a number of ways. You can describe them by type of contract- is it a lease? is it an affermage, it’s a french version of the lease, which tends to focus on the provision of water services to rural communities. Is it a concession? You’ll hear that phrase quite a bit. Is it a B.O.T. - build operate transfer? So, there’s all these acronyms and titles you’ll see. That’s just describing it by what the contractual framework is. Sometimes experts look at it instead, and say well, ‘a PPP can be measured by the degree of the private sector’s control over a public infrastructure asset or service.’ The greater degree of private control, the more of a PPP that you have and you’ve moved away from the traditional public sector delivery of those infrastructure needs or services. There’s just any number of other ways to describe it. I think that we’ve turned a corner. Those were helpful descriptions when we were trying to put form on something, and we weren’t sure what exactly it was. Ultimately as a government attorney, as someone involved in the day-to-day work doing public-private partnerships and creating a legislative regimen like we did in Maryland. I believe PPP’s are very jurisdictionally based. They’re defined by the legislative and administrative environments, in which they sit and in very real terms, they’re defined by the administrators that decide to undertake them. The solicitation for the private party contributors to the project is drafted by the administrators. Once the contract is awarded, it’s managed, it’s run, it’s evaluated, it’s reengineered and it’s approved, by the public sector administrators.
Once you move beyond the big picture descriptions, you get into the delivery of these projects. Just as an example -- this is one of the sections my paper talks about -- various legislative approaches. In California, not too long ago, a PPP was five specific legislatively authorized projects, only in transportation. Over time they’ve sort of broadened that and they’ve given more, generally enabling the legislation to allow these projects to occur, but that took some time. If you take, for example, South Korea. South Korea’s law has specific procurement *112 mechanisms embedded into the law that controls how these arise, that can dramatically affect the type of projects you have and the outcome of the project. In other instances, if you look at, for example, Ireland’s PPP law, they emulate the UK. The UK is one of the earlier adopters of P3s and virtually every jurisdiction has a different approach. I do want to note on Ireland’s point, is that they embed specific contractual frameworks in their legislation.
So, I think going forward, as we turn this corner it’s less about the global descriptions and more about lessons learned on the ground from actual legislative environments and actual projects, that have occurred and improving those systems going forward. So the task tonight really is not mine, going forward. I have worked to get a representative example, to get practitioners in all areas and you will see that there is probably not one definition of a PPP -- they all have different projects that they’ve experienced and different sectors that they have focused on so before I continue on-
