Public Private Partnership in Enabling Shelter Strategies

The capacity of individual people or their cooperative organizations to improve shelter is well recorded while how to replicate this success at a larger scale by interlinking the public, commercial private and non-commercial private/third sectors is less known.

Description

Three cases of successful partnerships from both developed and developing country cities are evaluated to assess the role and contribution of operational partnership arrangements among the various actors in the shelter-provision and -improvement process. The theoretical justifications for such partnerships are developed by outlining the comparative advantages of each sector individually and arguing the synergetic impact if such sectors are interlinked. While experiences of partnerships in developed countries gave background lessons, analyzing successful partnerships in the developing countries threw some light to the reasons of their success and the remarked failure in being unaffordable to the urban poor. It is concluded that public-third sector partnerships are the most effective to address the poorest 30% of income ladder while public private partnership can cater for the rest. Public private partnerships proved potent in installing major infrastructures and basic services if the state has able mechanisms of regulation.

Global Strategy for Shelter 2000 of the UN underscores that the withdrawal of the state from provision of housing towards a financial enabling and regulatory role is the best framework. A major element in this approach is to forge effective partnership to tap the private and third sector resources for shelter provision. In such cases, public private partnerships are the key to the success of the enabling approach to shelter.

The study redefines the "Private Sector" into two distinct categories: the commercial private sector simply known as ‘the Private’ sector and the non-commercial private sector or the ‘third sector’. The case study method is used and the selection depends on the level of partnership and the type of participant partners.

•  The Canadian case is a project level mixed partnerships arrangement between public, private and third sectors.
• The Turkish case is a public third sector partnership at programme level which included the local government and housing cooperatives.
• The Philippines case is a public private partnership between central and local government and private sector.
  
  

Modes of Public Private Partnership in Developing countries are:

• Public-Third sector
• Public-Private or joint venture
• Private-Third sector
• Mixed Partnership or Public-Private-Third sector
  
  

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Dr. Michael Edwards, Dr. Richard Peddie, Mr. Angelo Leynes, Mr. Bulent Tokman