Public-private partnerships as converging or diverging trends in public management?
A comparative analysis of PPP policy and regulation in Denmark and Ireland

The utilization of the public-private partnership (PPP) model as a means of delivering
various types of asset-based public services and infrastructure is often seen in academic
research as part of a globally spread public management reform trend. This view is
often suggested with reference to the staggering amount of attention and public money,
which is now being dedicated to the formation of PPPs worldwide. This article, however,
proceeds from the observation that if we look beyond the reports from a small handful
of primarily Anglo-Saxon countries, which have so far attracted widespread attention
in the PPP literature, we observe a much more divergent and heterogeneous pattern
in various national governments’ policy and regulation for PPP and the amount of
actually implemented PPP projects. By comparing the initiatives taken by the Irish government,
which has embraced PPPs, with those of the Danish government, which has
been PPP sceptic, the article draws on two in-depth country case studies to examine
how and why PPPs developed so differently in the two countries. The research illustrates
that whereas PPPs in Denmark have been subject to a loosely organized institutional
framework with a number of fundamental policy and regulation issues being either
unresolved or not very supportive to the uptake of PPPs, Ireland, on the other
hand, now presides over one of the most ambitious PPP programs in the world, with
major policy, regulation and procurement functions centralized within the Ministry of
Finance and the Treasury. As research on PPPs continues to proliferate, this article
illustrates that academic PPP literature would benefit from adopting a more explicit
comparative focus to account for these significant comparative differences in national
governments’ PPP approaches.