Who to blame: An inquiry into universal factors accounting for output variations in public–private partnership initiatives across geographical locations. Who to be blamed for not meeting performance, innovativeness, and quality outputs?

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1918
Date01 May 2019
Published date01 May 2019
ACADEMIC PAPER
Who to blame: An inquiry into universal factors accounting for
output variations in publicprivate partnership initiatives
across geographical locations. Who to be blamed for not
meeting performance, innovativeness, and quality outputs?
Alexander Narh Tetteh |Emmanuel Tetteh Teye |Beatrice Ayerakwa Abosi |Ren Chong
School of public Affairs, University of Science
and Technology of China, Hefei, China
Correspondence
Alexander Narh Tetteh, School of public
Affairs, University of Science and Technology
of China.
Email: narh.alexander25@gmail.com
With the current controversy and blame game on output of publicprivate
partnership (PPP) initiatives concerns, we investigate why there may be variations in
achieving innovativeness, perceived quality, and performance of PPP initiatives across
different geographical locations. For instance, we investigate a scenario where a
private company involved in waste management will perform in country Abut fails
to perform in country Bgiven the same assignment and target.We empirically
sampled and make conclusions with 475 respondents from the public sector, private
sector, and academia based on a survey inquiry. We adopted the structural equation
modeling method using the partial least square for the data analysis.
The results show that environmental dynamism causes major variations in desired
output of PPP initiatives followed by collaboration capacity, environmental fit, and
absorptive capacity, respectively. The findings further show that one partner cannot
be blamed entirely for causing the failure of PPP initiative. However, we conclude that
because on the basis of our data, environmental dynamism, which is as a result of
some governmental activities, depicts the highest effect on output, public partners
might be more liable. The findings from this study are an explicit view of PPP techno-
crats, which makes the conclusions more reliable.
1|INTRODUCTION
Publicprivate partnerships (PPPs) have been very popular in the last
two decades among governments as a governance strategy to
improve service delivery and realize huge infrastructural projects
(Nederhand & Klijn, 2018). PPP have enjoyed a global resurgence
and have become a symbol of modern public administration. (Hodge
& Greve, 2007). PPPs have become the most popular tools to deliver
infrastructure and public services across the globe (Hodge & Greve,
2007; Wang, Xiong, Wu, & Zhu, 2018). It has drawn considerable
attention from academic circles, as an innovative public procurement
approach (Wang et al., 2018). The idea has been and remains that by
intensive collaboration between the public and the private actors,
better, quality, and more innovative services and policy outputs
can be achieved (Ghobadian, Gallear, O'Regan, & Viney, 2004; Greve
& Ejersbo, 2003; Hodge & Greve, 2010; Ismail, 2014; Liu, Wang, &
Wilkinson et al., 2016). According to Klijn and Edelenbos (2013, p.
137), PPP is a cooperation between public and private actors with
a durable character in which actors develop mutual products
and/or services and in which risks, costs and benefits are shared.
From the perspective of Wang and Zhao (2018), PPP performance
can be broadly defined as the actual outcomes of a PPP project rel-
ative to its intended achievements, such as the attainment of gov-
ernment's goals and objectives in initiating a partnership.Factors
influencing PPP performance, innovativeness, and perceived quality
have been a key and vital question for both scholars and
practitioners interested in related practices (Wang & Zhao, 2018).
PPP promoters around the globe are increasingly ascertaining the
Received: 19 December 2018 Accepted: 28 December 2018
DOI: 10.1002/pa.1918
J Public Affairs. 2019;19:e1918.
https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1918
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of11

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