Abstract

Public–private partnership (PPP) has become a defining characteristic of modern governance. Interestingly, though, precisely how PPPs fit together with the evolution in recent decades of New Public Management (NPM) is less clear. PPPs can be broadly defined as organizations and institutions that mix elements from both the public sector and the private sector, and interest in PPPs has clearly gained momentum through the 1990s and in the 2000s. This chapter seeks to gain some conceptual clarity regarding just how notions of PPP fit within some of the developing ideas of public sector change.